Last year, we published a link to Daniel Wilf-Townsend's Harvard Law Review article Assembly-Line Plaintiffs. Now Jessica Steinberg of George Washington, Colleen F. Shanahan of Columbia, Anna E. Carpenter of Utah, and Alyx Mark of Wesleyan's Dept. of Government and the American Bar Foundation have written a response to it, The Democratic (Il)legitimacy of Assembly-Line […]
by Jeff Sovern Abstracts are due September 16. The conference will be at Berkeley on March 2-3, 2023. More information here. This is always one of the best consumer law conferences of the year so if you have a paper that will be ready to be workshopped next spring, I urge you to submit it.
Job is for the Boston or D.C. Office. Here's the announcement: Director of Litigation opportunity at the National Consumer Law Center The National Consumer Law Center, the country’s preeminent advocate for low-income consumers, proudly traces its roots to the 1960s “War on Poverty” in its work as a support center for legal services offices. NCLC’s […]
by Jeff Sovern Here, behind a pay wall. Excerpt: At present, banks generally are only required to repay consumers for payments they didn’t authorize. The coming regulatory guidance could change that threshold by maintaining that fraudulently induced transactions, even those approved by the consumer, are considered unauthorized. That could require a bank to conduct more […]
In response to the Supreme Court's recent ruling in West Virginia v. EPA, the National Consumer Law Center has written Impact of Supreme Court’s “Major Question Doctrine” on Consumer Litigation. Read it here.:
by Jeff Sovern The House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection and Commerce has forwarded to the full committee a bipartisan bill (draft here, though perhaps not the version the subcommittee approved; section-by-section commentary here). The last I heard, Senator Cantwell, the Senate Commerce Committee chair, had not signed on, putting the bill's future […]
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, more than 3100 people were killed in 2020 alone because drivers were distracted. A significant percentage of the problem is caused by cell-phone use while driving. We all see people texting while driving. Sending or reading a text can take the driver's eyes off the road for […]
Bernard Chao of Denver has written Unjust Enrichment: Standing Up for Privacy Rights. Here is the abstract: In TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez, one of the country’s largest credit reporting agencies violated the Federal Credit Report Act (“FCRA”) by failing to “follow reasonable procedures to assure maximum possible accuracy . . ..” As a result, thousands of […]
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has issued a legal interpretation to ensure that companies that use and share credit reports and background reports have a permissible purpose under the Fair Credit Reporting Act. The CFPB’s new advisory opinion makes clear that credit reporting companies and users of credit reports have specific obligations to protect the […]
Today, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau fined Bank of America $100 million for botching the disbursement of state unemployment benefits at the height of the pandemic. The CFPB said that "Bank of America automatically and unlawfully froze people’s accounts with a faulty fraud detection program, and then gave them little recourse when there was, in […]