Category Archives: Uncategorized

Should the U.S. impose greater inheritance taxes to alleviate student-loan debt?

That's the topic of a bluntly-titled article — Taxing Rich Dead People to Tackle Student Loan Debt — by law prof Victoria J. Haneman. The abstract follows. (Note in particular the stats in the second paragraph of the abstract concerning Millennials' financial situation.) Once upon a time, there was a generation of indentured servants called […]

NYT: “Trump’s Payback for Payday Lenders”

A New York Times editorial today addresses the proposal by the Consumer Financial protection Bureau to gut the Bureau's own rule protecting low-income borrowers from predatory practices of payday lenders. As the NYT put it, "The federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau betrayed financially vulnerable Americans last week by proposing to gut rules conceived during the […]

Consumer Warning: Copyright Trolling by Higbee and Associates

Over the past few years, the law firm Higbee and Associates (based in Los Angeles, although it pretentiously labels itself a "National Law Firm") has become identified with a pattern of making aggressive and, in many cases, unsupportable demands for the payment of significant sums of money by individuals and nonprofits whose web sites feature […]

CFPB proposes to drop protections for low-income borrowers

In 2017, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau issued a rule to protect borrowers from payday lending practices that harmed consumers. Today it proposed to eliminate several important protections that it earlier adopted to prevent industry practices from trapping low-income people in cycles of debt. I have not yet had a chance to read proposal in […]

Ninth Circuit Strikes Down San Francisco Soda Warnings

In an en banc decision late last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that a San Francisco ordinance requiring ads for sugar-sweetened beverages to warn of the link between overconsumption and obesity violates the First Amendment. The decision indicates that the Supreme Court's decision last term in National Institute of […]

CFPB settles deceptive marketing case with payday lenders (for $0)

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau today filed a proposed settlement with several payday lenders: NDG Financial Corp., E-Care Contact Centers, Ltd., Blizzard Interactive Corp., New World Consolidated Lending Corp., New World Lenders Corp., Payroll Loans First Lenders Corp., New World RRSP Lenders Corp., Northway Financial Corp., Ltd., and Northway Broker, Ltd., as well as several […]

CFPB issues $1 fine for scamming veterans

I missed this last week: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau settled a case against Mark Corbett, a broker of contracts offering high-interest credit to veterans. The CFPB explained that it "found that Corbett violated the Consumer Financial Protection Act of 2010 by misrepresenting to consumers that the contracts he facilitates are valid and enforceable when, […]

New article on class-action “ascertainability”

Law prof Rhonda Wasserman has written Ascertainability: Prose, Policy, and Process. "Ascertainability" is a judge-made doctrine about, among other things, whether a would-be class representative must prove that there is an administratively feasible means of identifying class members before the court may certify a case as a class action. Here's the abstract: One of the most […]