Manufacturers’ liability for crashes in automated vehicles

Law profs Kenneth Abraham and Robert Rabin have written Automated Vehicles and Manufacturer Responsibility for Accidents: A New Legal Regime for a New Era. Here is the abstract: The United States is on the verge of a new era in transportation, requiring a new legal regime. Over the coming decades, there will be a revolution in […]

Silber & Stites Paper on Merchant Authorized Consumer Cash Subsitutes

Norman I. Silber of Hofstra and Steven Stites of Stites & Harbison PLLC have written Merchant Authorized Consumer Cash Substitutes. Here is the abstract: Merchant Authorized Consumer Cash Substitutes (MACCS) have existed in one form or another for hundreds of years although without a generic name. At nineteenth century American railroad construction sites far from established […]

Report that Racial Bias Widespread in Customer Service

by Jeff Sovern The NY Times has an op-ed, Beyond Starbucks: How Racism Shapes Customer Service. Here’s an excerpt: In one experiment, we emailed approximately 6,000 hotels across the United States from 12 fictitious email accounts. We varied the names of the senders to signal different attributes, such as race and gender, to the recipients.  […]

What Are We To Make of the CFPB’s Billion Dollar Wells Fine?

by Jeff Sovern As Allison posted earlier, the CFPB has levied a $1 billion fine on Wells.  Some first reactions: A person inclined to give acting director Mulvaney the benefit of the doubt might say that this shows that the Bureau is keeping Mr. Mulvaney's promise to enforce consumer financial protection laws vigorously when that […]

Trump-republican tax reform: Banks saved $3.6 billion last quarter

AP reporter Ken Sweet explains that Big Banks Saved $3.6B in Taxes Last Quarter Under New (Tax) Law. An excerpt: The nation's six big Wall Street banks posted record, or near record, profits in the first quarter, and they can thank one person in particular: President Donald Trump. While higher interest rates allowed banks to earn […]

Teaching Consumer Law Conference is Next Month

Register Now for the tenth biennial Teaching Consumer Law Conference "Teaching Consumer Law–Where We've Been–Where We're Going." It will be held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, May 18-19th. The Conference is designed for those teaching consumer law, those interested in teaching consumer law full-time or as an adjunct, and anyone interested in discussing the current […]

More on congressional effort to kill CFPB’s auto lending guidance

Following up on Jeff's post yesterday, read Nikitra Bailey's piece in the American Banker entitled Scrapping CFPR auto lending rule would only lead to more discrimination. Here's an excerpt: A group of senators is working to make it easier for automobile dealers to discriminate against consumers of color, setting them up to pay unfair additional fees on their loans. […]

Senate Likely to Vote to Rescind CFPB Indirect Auto Guidance

The Senate voted, 50-47, to debate whether to use the Congressional Review Act to rescind the CFPB Indirect Auto Guidance. As it is unlikely that a senator would vote both to debate the issue and retain the Guidance, that almost certainly means the Senate will vote to block the Guidance when it votes, probably tomorrow, on […]