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by Jeff Sovern Regular readers of this blog know that I collect instances of people agreeing to contracts without reading them. Among my examples: Chief Justice Roberts, Judge Posner, Hillary Clinton, and consumer law professors. Now I think we can add FTC Commissioner Noah Phillips to the list, though his remarks are ambiguous enough that […]
Starting today, consumers who are concerned about identity theft or data breaches can freeze their credit and place one-year fraud alerts for free. The Federal Trade Commission explains, here.
American Airlines is threatening to prohibit customers from making changes to nonrefundable tickets if Congress makes good on a proposal to crack down on what critics call unreasonable airline fees. The NYT article is here.
Dee Pridgen is seeking a coauthor/collaborator for her two treatises published by Thomson Reuters, Consumer Protection and the Law and Consumer Credit and the Law. These books have been updated yearly for 30 years and are available both in print and on Westlaw. Her current coauthor, Richard Alderman, Professor Emeritus of the University of Houston […]
Law prof Richard Frankel has written The Federal Arbitration Act and Independent Contractors, which takes up an issue before the Supreme Court in New Prime v. Oliveira. Here's the abstract of Frankel's article: The misclassification of employees as independent contractors is one of the most serious problems affecting the American workforce. Wrongly labeling workers as independent contractors […]
by Jeff Sovern The CFPB has announced the new members of its Consumer Advisory Board: the new board has fewer members than the old one–meaning fewer viewpoints are represented–and the members will serve for shorter terms, making it harder for them to accumulate relevant experience with board service. I wonder if this is just an […]
Student loan debt has jumped from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion in the last 5 years. The Education Department's official default rates voanews seriously understate the share of young borrowers who default, or are not able to repay their loans. In the face of the growing student loan debt crisis, the Administration's corrupt policy is […]
Andrea Chandrasekher and David Horton, both of California, Davis, have written Arbitration Nation: Data from Four Providers, 109 California Law Review. Here's the abstract: Forced arbitration has long been controversial. In the 1980s, the Supreme Court expanded the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA), sparking debate about whether private dispute resolution is an elegant alternative to litigation or a rigged […]
The New York Times reports: After the education secretary, Betsy DeVos, started scaling back consumer protections for student borrowers last year, six states and the District of Columbia sped up their own efforts to crack down on abusive lending practices by companies that administer federal loan programs. Now Ms. DeVos is trying to stop them. […]