A customer brought a consumer class action against Procter & Gamble over its use of the phrase “Nature Fusion,” along with a picture of an avocado, on certain products’ bottles, claiming it was an unfair and deceptive business practice and false advertising under California law, misleading consumers into thinking the product was natural. A Ninth […]
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In March 2022, a FINRA panel found that Alpine, a securities broker-dealer, “converted and misused customer funds and securities, engaged in unauthorized trading, charged and paid customers unfair prices in securities transactions, charged customers unreasonable and discriminatory fees, and made an unauthorized capital withdrawal.” FINRA then found that Alpine violated its cease-and-desist order 35,000 times, […]
Read Amazon’s Pricing Paradox by Rory Van Loo and Nikita Aggarwal. Here’s the abstract: Amidst contentious debates about whether Amazon wields excess market power to harm competitors, one of the few things that most parties have agreed upon is that Amazon offers low prices. This Article challenges that assumption by demonstrating that Amazon charges higher prices […]
In a 94-page opinion issued after a lengthy bench trial, a Massachusetts District Judge has found the “Northeast Alliance” between American Airlines and JetBlue, by which the two airlines coordinated their flights out of New York and Boston, to violate the Sherman Act. An appeal is sure to follow. But the main takeaway from the […]
The Department of Transportation today announced it will be issuing an NPRM to require airlines provide compensation and reimbursement of expenses when passengers are affected by “controllable” cancellation or significant delays of their flights. DOT notes that practices among carriers currently varies, and airlines use different definitions of what constitutes “controllable” flight disruptions. DOT also […]
In 2020, Minnesota adopted the Alec Smith Insulin Affordability Act which, among other things, requires drug manufacturers to provide insulin for free to Minnesota residents who meet certain criteria. PhRMA sued in federal court, alleging the law constituted a Takings Clause violation, and seeking declaratory and injunctive relief. The district court dismissed the suit on […]
It was almost twenty years ago that Barbra Streisand filed a lawsuit that attempted to block access to a photograph of her oceanfront estate, bringing unwanted attention to the photo and leading to her being enshrined by Techdirt’s Mike Masnick in tech/legal terminology as the progenitor of “the Streisand Effect.” Now we have Cooley v. […]
On Friday, a unanimous panel of the Fifth Circuit rejected a challenge brought by the anti-regulation advocacy organization Consumers’ Research to Congress’s creation of the Universal Service Fund. The Fund imposes charges on telecom providers and then uses the money to fund access to telecommunications services for low-income consumers, schools, libraries, and rural health-care providers, […]
Here. Excerpt: [A doctor’s] claim was just one of roughly 60,000 that [medical director Dr.] Dopke denied in a single month last year, according to internal Cigna records reviewed by ProPublica and The Capitol Forum. The rejection of van Terheyden’s claim was typical for Cigna, one of the country’s largest insurers. The company has built […]
Public health campaigns over the past decades have been successful in reducing the prevalence of cigarette smoking in the U.S., particularly among adolescents. The tobacco industry has thus pivoted to e-cigarettes and vaping. Studies show young people, in particular, mistakenly believe such products are not unhealthy, and have been flocking to such products in droves. […]