Law profs Charlie Silver, David Hyman, and Bernard Black have published Fictions and Facts: Medical Malpractice Litigation, Physician Supply, and Health Care Spending in Texas Before and after HB 4. Note the study's findings in the abstract below: This article, written for a symposium issue of the Texas Tech Law Review, summarizes our research on […]
That's the topic of a bluntly-titled article — Taxing Rich Dead People to Tackle Student Loan Debt — by law prof Victoria J. Haneman. The abstract follows. (Note in particular the stats in the second paragraph of the abstract concerning Millennials' financial situation.) Once upon a time, there was a generation of indentured servants called […]
The University of Michigan Center for Finance, Law and Policy is holding a conference titled Consumer Protection in an Age of Uncertainty on March 21 and 22. It's great that there will be two excellent consumer law academic conferences in so short a span!
The Berkeley Center for Consumer Law & Economic Justice is holding its Consumer Law Scholars Conference on Thursday and Friday. More information, including the papers to be discussed, here. The Conference has an impressive list of participants and it promises to be a terrific event.
Natasha Sarin of Penn has written Making Consumer Finance Work. Here's the abstract: The financial crisis exposed major faultlines in banking and financial markets more broadly. Policymakers responded with far-reaching regulation that created a new agency—the CFPB—and changed the structure and function of these markets. Consumer advocates cheered reforms as welfare-enhancing, while the financial sector declared […]
Today, my colleagues at U.S. PIRG Education Fund and the Frontier Group released a new report, “Driving Into Debt: The Hidden Cost of Risky Auto Loans to Consumers and Our Communities.” According to the executive summary (emphasis in original): In much of America, access to a car is all but required to hold a job […]
Scammers who use love to target consumers can take both an emotional and a financial toll on their victims. New complaint data from the Federal Trade Commission shows romance scams generated more reported losses than any other consumer fraud type reported to the agency in 2018. The FTC reports that romance scammers "often find their […]
Seven million Americans are at least 90 days behind on payments for automobile loans, according to a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. According to the study, more people are now delinquent or late on loan payments than at the height of the 2008 financial crisis. A blog post by the study's […]
A New York Times editorial today addresses the proposal by the Consumer Financial protection Bureau to gut the Bureau's own rule protecting low-income borrowers from predatory practices of payday lenders. As the NYT put it, "The federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau betrayed financially vulnerable Americans last week by proposing to gut rules conceived during the […]
Over the past few years, the law firm Higbee and Associates (based in Los Angeles, although it pretentiously labels itself a “National Law Firm”) has become identified with a pattern of making aggressive and, in many cases, unsupportable demands for the payment of significant sums of money by individuals and nonprofits whose web sites feature […]