Law profs Stephen Burbank and Sean Farhang have written Politics, Identity, and Class Certification on the U.S. Courts of Appeals, which asks whether there are associations between personal characteristics of appellate judges and the party of the presidents who appointed those judges, among other things, and class-certification decisions. Here is the abstract: This article draws […]
Jamie Luguri and Lior Strahilevitz, both of Chicago, have written Shining a Light on Dark Patterns. Here is the abstract: Dark patterns are user interfaces whose designers knowingly confuse users, make it difficult for users to express their actual preferences, or manipulate users into taking certain actions. They typically exploit cognitive biases and prompt online consumers […]
Here. Excerpt: Companies like National Debt Relief seek out heavily indebted consumers with a promise to help them get out from under it. But regulators say these debt-settlement programs can leave customers worse off, facing high fees, damaged credit scores and unexpected income-tax bills. * * * Data from credit-reporting companies has been used by some debt-settlement […]
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday affirmed the district court’s order certifying a class Facebook users in a case challenging Facebook’s facial-recognition technology as a violation of Illinois’s Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA).The court held that plaintiffs alleged a concrete and particularized harm, sufficient to confer Article III standing, because BIPA protected the […]
Scotusblog this week posted an analysis of the U.S. Supreme Court's review of class action cases. Among its observations is that the Court overturns almost 70 percent of class action decisions made by appeals courts by either reversing or vacating these decisions. In addition, the analysis found that, between the 2010 and 2018 terms, the […]
The Washington Post reports today on debt collectors' tactics to revive debts that they cannot otherwise collect on because the statute of limitations has passed. If the consumer makes a payment, even against his or her own will, that can be used to try to revive the life of the debt. So debt collectors often […]
We've received the following Call for Papers: 4th CFPB Research Conference on Consumer FinanceDecember 12th–13th, 2019This December, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) will host its fourth researchconference on consumer finance at Catholic University in Washington, DC. Information on priorconferences can be found here: https://www.consumerfinance.gov/data-research/cfpbresearch-conference/We encourage the submission of a variety of research. This includes, […]
Last week, the Federal Trade Commission announced a $700 million settlement with Equifax concerning its liability for the 2017 data breach in which hackers stole the personal information of 147 million people. The settlement seemed to offer people as much as $125 in cash. In the week after the FTC announced the settlement, more than […]
by Paul Alan Levy What sort of showing must a criticized business make when it wants to identify an anonymous online critic on the theory that the critic was never an actual customer and that, consequently, any criticisms are necessarily false? Attorney Thomas P. Kelly III of Santa Rosa California That issue has been presented […]
The California Supreme Court today issued its unanimous decision in Noel v. Thrifty Payless Inc., which rejected a strict class-certification "ascertainability" requirement sometimes associated with decisions of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. This paragraph sums up the issue and the court's conclusion: This case is a putative class action brought on […]