by Jeff Sovern
This is completely self-serving, but law professor readers of this blog may be interested to learn that the fourth edition of our casebook, Consumer Law, Cases and Materials, Fourth Edition is now available. As I said in April, our goal was to continue comprehensive coverage of core consumer law subjects (like deceptive advertising, Truth in Lending, bait and switch, credit reporting and discrimination, credit card laws, lemon laws and other warranty rules, debt collection, and enforcement) while also updating the book to reflect new developments in the dynamic field of consumer law, including:
- Internet marketing and social networks, such as Facebook
- The consumer protection issues that contributed to the subprime mortgage foreclosure crisis, as well as the legal fallout from that crisis, including the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
- The Credit CARD Act of 2009
- Online marketing and tracking as well as other privacy issues
- Emerging payment systems – e.g., credit, debit and stored value cards
- The latest U.S. Supreme Court developments on consumer arbitration
- Predatory lending
- Ad substantiation, celebrity and other testimonials
- The debt buying industry and debt collection practices employed in that industry.
We added a new co-author, Chris Peterson of Utah and currently at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, to our lineup of Andy Spanogle of GW, Ralph Rohner of Catholic, and Dee Pridgen of Wyoming. Chris is known for scholarship on predatory lending, among other things, and he revitalized the predatory lending chapter, and made other significant contributions. As in past editions, this text contains a balance of cases, problems that reflect modern situations, and notes with discussion questions and references to the latest consumer protection scholarship, including behavioral economic research that sheds light on how consumers actually behave. The updated teacher's manual and a new edition of Selected Consumer Statutes should be out shortly. I am quite excited about this new volume and I am confident that when people see it, they will share that excitement.
