The Eleventh Circuit has just held in Salcedo v. Hanna that, under the circumstances pleaded there, a plaintiff who received one unsolicited text message lacked Article III standing to sue under Telephone Consumer Protection Act. The court relied on the Supreme Court's decision in Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins, 136 S. Ct. 1540 (2016), and maintained […]
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The Wall Street Journal reports that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is hiring again, following a 15 percent loss of staff since the Trump Administration took over the agency in late 2017. The CFPB "recently lifted a nearly two-year hiring freeze, according to an internal email reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. It also has […]
The Ninth Circuit has held, in Dorman v. Charles Schwab, that ERISA claims (brought in court in a class action) can be forced out of court and into individual arbitration through an arbitration clause in an amendment to an ERISA 401(k) plan forced on Schwab's employees. Here's how the Ninth Circuit's informal summary explains the […]
Two recent appellate decisions have continued the courts' exploration of how the Supreme Court's Spokeo standing decision affects cases under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA). Both find that a debt collector's actions violated a right conferred on consumers by the statute and that the deprivation of the right was an injury sufficient to […]
Law profs Stephen Burbank and Sean Farhang have written Politics, Identity, and Class Certification on the U.S. Courts of Appeals, which asks whether there are associations between personal characteristics of appellate judges and the party of the presidents who appointed those judges, among other things, and class-certification decisions. Here is the abstract: This article draws […]
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday affirmed the district court’s order certifying a class Facebook users in a case challenging Facebook’s facial-recognition technology as a violation of Illinois’s Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA).The court held that plaintiffs alleged a concrete and particularized harm, sufficient to confer Article III standing, because BIPA protected the […]
Scotusblog this week posted an analysis of the U.S. Supreme Court's review of class action cases. Among its observations is that the Court overturns almost 70 percent of class action decisions made by appeals courts by either reversing or vacating these decisions. In addition, the analysis found that, between the 2010 and 2018 terms, the […]
The Washington Post reports today on debt collectors' tactics to revive debts that they cannot otherwise collect on because the statute of limitations has passed. If the consumer makes a payment, even against his or her own will, that can be used to try to revive the life of the debt. So debt collectors often […]
Last week, the Federal Trade Commission announced a $700 million settlement with Equifax concerning its liability for the 2017 data breach in which hackers stole the personal information of 147 million people. The settlement seemed to offer people as much as $125 in cash. In the week after the FTC announced the settlement, more than […]
by Paul Alan Levy What sort of showing must a criticized business make when it wants to identify an anonymous online critic on the theory that the critic was never an actual customer and that, consequently, any criticisms are necessarily false? Attorney Thomas P. Kelly III of Santa Rosa California That issue has been presented […]