At Ballard Spahr’s Consumer Finance Monitor podcast.
The so-called Big Beautiful Bill caps an individual’s aggregate government student loans for professional school education at $150,000. For many people, that wouldn’t be enough to cover the cost of attending, for example, a law or medical school. A 2021 ABA study that surveyed more than 1300 lawyers who had graduated or been licensed in the […]
Jonathan S. Gould of Berkeley & Rory Van Loo of BU have written Legislating for the Future, 92 U. Chi. L. Rev. 375 (2025). The article is about legislation to prevent financial crises but much of it applies to consumer protection statutes in general. They say, for example: Members of Congress focus on their immediate […]
Here, in Bloomberg Law. Weinberger writes: That Vought is telling CFPB employees to come collect their personal belongings is a sign that he’s confident the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit will overturn a lower court ruling that blocked an attempt to fire nearly 1,500 members of the approximately 1,700 people who worked […]
In 2008, Puerto Rico adopted a law prohibiting merchants from charging credit card surcharges, while allowing merchants to offer cash discounts. In 2013, the legislature dropped the provision allowing cash discounts, and the Puerto Rico Department of Consumer Affairs has since issued an interpretation that cash discounts are forbidden. A group of merchants sued, arguing […]
In his Bloomberg Law article, Trump’s Eventual CFPB Pick Will Work in White House’s Shadow, Evan Weinberger reports that “Mark Calabria, an Office of Management and Budget official currently detailed to the CFPB and former director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, and acting Comptroller of the Currency Rodney Hood” are under consideration. But Weinberger also […]
The arbitration firm JAMS posted a piece this week recognizing the 100th anniversary of the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA). Indeed, Congress passed the FAA in Feb. 1925 to facilitate resolution of business to business disputes, validating the ability of commercial parties of relatively equal bargaining power to agree in their contracts to resolve their disputes […]
Patricia A. McCoy of Boston College has written Inflection Points in The Drafting of the Restatement on Consumer Contracts: Salience and Its ARC. Here’s the abstract: When the Reporters of the Restatement of the Law, Consumer Contracts (RCK or Restatement) undertook that project for the American Law Institute, they faced a bind. Courts generally infer blanket […]
Here, by Abha Bhattarai. According to the article “Credit scores dipped by more than 100 points for 2.2 million delinquent student loan borrowers, and 150 points or more for more than 1 million in the first three months of 2025, according to an analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.” Student loan borrowers […]
In the Baltimore Sun (also available on Lexis) titled “Marylanders deserve to know what tariffs are costing them.” The op-ed, which I wrote, specifically addresses Maryland but the arguments apply to other states too. Here are two paragraphs (the essay had previously noted that the White House had attacked Amazon’s consideration of tariff disclosures as […]