On Friday, the DC Circuit held that two groups of federal workers can move forward with class action lawsuits against the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) over a 2015 data breach that exposed the personal information of 22 million people.The district court had dismissed the case, holding that the plaintiffs lacked standing and had failed […]
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The Federal Trade Commission has reportedly launched an investigation into YouTube after complaints from consumer groups and privacy advocates alleging that YouTube violates kids' privacy. The complaints contend that YouTube failed to protect kids who used the streaming-video service and improperly collected their data in violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, a 1998 […]
Professors Brian Feinstein, Chen Meng, and Manisha Padi took a look at that question from one angle in State Attorneys General & Lender Behavior. Here is the abstract: The Dodd-Frank Act empowers state attorneys general to enforce, with limited exception, both state and federal laws concerning predatory lending, unfair and deceptive practices, information disclosure, and […]
That's the title of this ProPublica piece by Anjali Tsui and Alice Wilder. Among other things, this article explains that the payday loan industry's trade group has held its last two annual conventions at a Trump property while at the same time that the Trump Administration's regulatory stance has been decidedly pro-payday lending. The article […]
The Dallas Morning News reports that Think Finance Inc., a Fort Worth financial firm, will cancel its outstanding loans and pay nearly $40 million to consumers after engaging in an alleged payday lending operation that used Native American tribes as shields from state laws. Think Finance serviced loans that charged interest rates over 375% and […]
In yesterday's opinion in Virginia Uranium, Inc. v. Warren, the Supreme Court held that a Virginia law banning uranium mining is not preempted by the Atomic Energy Act. The vote was 6 to 3, with the six Justices in the majority divided between two separate opinions—the first announcing the judgment of the Court, written by […]
In The Continuum of Aggregation, law prof Alexi Lahav discusses the commonalities in various types of aggregated litigation. Here is the abstract: This essay, written for a conference marking the fiftieth anniversary of the multidistrict litigation statute, 28 U.S.C. § 1407, traces the evolution in thinking about aggregation, analyzes the forms of aggregate litigation — […]
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit yesterday rejected Facebook's effort to avoid a Telephone Consumer Protection Act lawsuit on First Amendment grounds. Facebook had argued that a recent amendment to the law, which excepted calls seeking to collect debts owed to or guaranteed by the federal government from the TCPA's ban on […]
More than 20 U.S. senators are calling on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to reconsider a proposal to allow debt collectors to send unlimited texts and emails to consumers, and to call consumers seven times a week per debt, USA Today reports. “By allowing debt collectors to send consumers unlimited text messages and emails without […]
by Paul Alan Levy About a month ago, I blogged about a new variant in Matthew Higbee’s high-volume copyright enforcement practice on behalf of photographers, in which he was pursuing the hosts of online forums where users had posted copyrighted photographs or deep links to copyrighted photographs, taking advantage of those hosts who had failed […]