In a detailed and informative post entitled Judge Declares Some PACER Fees Illegal but Does Not Go Far Enough, open-courts activist Steve Schultze says explains that Five years ago, in a post called “Making Excuses for Fees on Electronic Public Records,” I described my attempts to persuade the federal Judiciary to stop charging for access […]
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In case you missed the punchline of Jeff Sovern's post on the CFPB's annual report, the news is not the report itself (which conscientiously recites the CFPB's actions between February and September 2017, before Mick Mulvaney was appointed Acting Director following Richard Cordray's departure), but the cover letter, in which Mulvaney proposes that Congress gut […]
by Jeff Sovern Apparently the Lucchese Organized Crime Family charges less than a quarter of what payday lenders charge. Last week, New York State Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman announced indictments of ten members of the group in the largest loansharking investigation in the office's history. Schneiderman's press release reports: [U]surious interest payouts exceed[ed] a million […]
Many of our readers no doubt have read that Scott Pruitt (EPA head and climate change denier) is planning to scrap the Obama Administration's fuel-economy targets aimed at making cars more fuel efficient (and, in turn, having some positive effect on climate change). This article by Evan Halper explains that California plans to stick with the higher […]
by Paul Alan Levy Despite the passage of the Consumer Review Fairness Act in December 2016, businesses continue to use non-disclosure and non-disparagement clauses in form contracts to suppress criticism of their products and services. This blog post summarizes several situations in which we have been involved recently. Premier Pools and Spas in Dallas The […]
From Kenosha News (WI), "Group rallies against high-interest lending practices in Kenosha, state" (March 27), here. From Akron Beacon Journal / Ohio.com, "Editorial: Real regulation for payday lenders" (March 26), here. From Wall Street Journal, "Florida Gives Payday Lenders a Boost" (March 19), here. From Nonprofit Quarterly, "Florida Senate Backs Changes in Payday Loans that […]
Louisville consumer lawyer Ben Carter just wrote this opinion piece for the Louisville Courier-Journal on the Trump Administration’s efforts to roll back state-specific consumer protections on payday lending and student loan debt servicing.
This article says that "[t]he top cop for U.S. consumer finance has decided not to sue a payday loan collector and is weighing whether to drop cases against three payday lenders, said five people with direct knowledge of the matter." "Top cop" for whom?
The National Employment Lawyers Association Institute has just released this report about forced arbitration in the workplace. Here's how the Institute describes the report: Authored by Loyola University New Orleans College of Law Prof. Imre S. Szalai, this groundbreaking report finds that 80 percent of Fortune 100 companies use arbitration in their employment documents, nearly half of […]
This article by Hugo Martin explains: The smartphone video that went viral last year showing a United Airlines passenger being dragged out of an overbooked flight prompted several large airlines to vow to end or dramatically reduce the number of passengers denied a seat. The nation's airlines have made good on that promise. *** or its part, […]