Law prof Richard Frankel has written The Federal Arbitration Act and Independent Contractors, which takes up an issue before the Supreme Court in New Prime v. Oliveira. Here's the abstract of Frankel's article: The misclassification of employees as independent contractors is one of the most serious problems affecting the American workforce. Wrongly labeling workers as independent contractors […]
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The New York Times reports: After the education secretary, Betsy DeVos, started scaling back consumer protections for student borrowers last year, six states and the District of Columbia sped up their own efforts to crack down on abusive lending practices by companies that administer federal loan programs. Now Ms. DeVos is trying to stop them. […]
The Hill reports that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is calling on Congress to come up with a federal privacy standard in order to preempt states from passing their own laws governing data collection. The article is here.
In a new article, The Discovery Tax, law prof Brian Fitzpatrick proposes a litigation discovery tax. Generally, the scheme would impose more tax on consumer, civil-rights, and other plaintiffs (because plaintiffs tend to have more to discover from defendants than the other way around). Here is the abstract: The American civil discovery regime is what […]
The Washington Post, addressing the current work of the CFPB and the Department of Education, had editorials yesterday and today pertinent to student loans and higher education: Read "The Trump administration’s scandalous handling of student loans," here. Read "How Betsy DeVos could trigger another financial meltdown," here. The New York Times, addressing proposed changes by […]
Cornucopia Institute, a Wisconsin-based farm policy group, said consumers cannot rely only on the organic seal from the USDA. The group says that the USDA is failing to protect ethical industry participants and consumers from fraud. Food Safety News has the story, here.
That's the topic of A New Legal Framework for Employee and Consumer Arbitration Agreements by law prof Imre Szalai. Here's the abstract: If an arbitration clause in an employment or consumer agreement contains a harsh term, such as an abbreviated statute of limitations or a provision requiring arbitration in a distant location, judges will sometimes sever the […]
by Paul Alan Levy A few months ago, I blogged about an important Sixth Circuit ruling on the issue of online anonymity. Signature Management Team v. Doe, 876 F.3d 831 (2017), came close to endorsing the Dendrite approach to deciding whether a defendant who has been sued for allegedly inappropriate behavior should be denied the […]
That's the headline of this article by Kevin Breuninger's piece. Here are the key take-aways of Breuninger's piece: Sen Warren proposes a new bill that would ban members of Congress and the White House staff from owning individual stocks. As an apparent alternative, the legislation would create "conflict-free investment opportunities for federal officials with new investment […]
Michael Hiltzik's column, titled Bankruptcy is hitting more older Americans, pointing to a retirement crisis in the making, surveys a new report about the growing number of bankruptcies filed by older people. One reason for this trend is that retired workers generally no longer have company-paid pensions. He notes that a sizable percentage of American workers were […]