Happy New Year.

Law prof Jean Sternlight has written Mandatory Arbitration Stymies Progress Towards Justice in Employment Law: Where To, #MeToo?. Here's the abstract: Today our employment law provides workers with far more protection than once existed with respect to hiring, firing, salary, and workplace conditions. Despite these gains, continued progress towards justice is currently in jeopardy due […]

In case you've not read about the allegations that Johnson & Johnson covered up possible asbestos contamination in its baby powder, read this article by Roni Caryn Rabin and Tiffany Hsu. We've posted before (for instance, here) about suits against Johnson & Johnson alleging that talc in baby powder caused the plaintiffs' ovarian cancer. Plaintiffs […]

Alison Frankel of Reuters reports that the Delaware Chancery Court has held that Delaware corporations lack authority to include in their charters "forum selection clauses" applicable to federal securities fraud claims asserted by shareholders. Put more simply, the ruling limits corporate power to tell shareholders where they have to file their claims. As Frankel's article […]

Today, in conjunction with a new study that details a host of concerning practices in apps targeted to young children, 22 consumer and public health advocacy groups (including Public Citizen) called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the preschool app market. The groups' letter urges the FTC to hold app makers accountable for unfair and […]

The Partnership for Public Service issues an annual ranking of "Best Places to Work" in the federal government. The rankings are based on questions posed to hundreds of thousands of federal employees. This year, two agencies abut which we frequently blog declined in the rankings. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's score fell 25.2 points from […]

The vaping industry's First Amendment challenge to FDA e-cigarette marketing rules remains pending in the DC Circuit, where it awaits decision following oral arguments this past September. But federal officials aren't the only ones trying to regulate the industry's practices: States also regulate vape shops operating within their jurisdictions. And last week, state regulations also […]

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is required by statute to prepare an annual report on student borrowers’ top complaints. In previous years, the CFPB has submitted the report to Congress in October. This year, it did not do so and has yet to do so. MarketWatch reports that "[t]The CFPB skipping the report isn’t a […]

The Department of Housing and Urban Development has not announced a formal policy denying [Federal Housing Administration] loans for DACA recipients, but lenders tell BuzzFeed News that’s the guidance they’re getting from officials. The BuzzFeed story is here.

I am very happy to report that the Department of Education is finally implementing its Borrower Defense rule, an Obama-era regulation intended to protect students from predatory colleges and universities. The rule requires the department to provide automatic discharges of federal loans to certain borrowers who cannot complete their programs of study because the borrowers’ […]