Two Senators — Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Marco Rubio (R-FL) — are introducing a bill today that would ban the use confessions of judgment by predatory lenders. The issue is a provision in some loan agreements for small businesses, in which the lender requires the small-business borrower to agree not to defend themselves in court […]
by Jeff Sovern That's the title of my essay my colleague Gina Calabrese and I wrote here in Bloomberg Law. Excerpt: The ABA argues that consumers don’t need protection from unscrupulous lawyers because lawyers are already subject to state ethics rules largely written by the ABA itself. Experience tells us otherwise. When a law firm sued […]
Originally posted in Take Care Blog Law prof Mark Totten has written an interesting piece for the Take Care Blog entitled Proving that Mick Mulvaney Compromised CFPB Enforcement. We posted Tuesday about a Washington Post article, which cited Mark's data on the CFPB's waning enforcement efforts. Read Mark's post and take a look at the chart below.
The Washington Post reports today on the Consumer Financial protection Bureau, one year after Director Richard Cordray, who was appointed by President Obama, stepped down and was replaced with OMB Director Mick Mulvaney. If you care about consumer financial protection, it's not a happy story. One year after Mulvaney’s arrival, he and his political aides […]
by Paul Alan Levy A new Virginia case presents one of the less-frequently-litigated issues in the realm of the First Amendment right to speak anonymously — when the identity of an anonymous blogger (or other Internet speaker) can be demanded not so that she can be served with a summons in a lawsuit alleging that […]
The Hill reports that changing the name of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau could cost the businesses it regulates more than $300 million. Banks, lenders and other financial services firms subject to CFPB supervision could be required to spend millions of dollars if the agency goes through with a rebranding proposal from acting Director Mick […]
WaPo has the story here. The government is also considering other debt collection initiatives, as noted in the article.
The Federal Communications Commission recently released a proposal "to reduce unwanted robocalls and support blocking of spam robotexts." A Washington Post editorial today argues that the FCC proposal on spam texts "empowers companies instead of consumers." The gist of the issue is this: The FCC announced in November that it plans formally to classify text […]
Amendments to Rules 5, 23, 62, and 65.1 went into effect yesterday. You can view them, as well as amendments to the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure, here. Of particular interest for consumer law are the amendments to Rule 23, which provide grounds for the district court's approval of a proposed class-action settlement, disclosure of […]
Kenneth P. Brevoort, Jasper Clarkberg, Michelle Kambara, and Benjamin Litwin, all currently or formerly at the CFPB, have written The Geography of Credit Invisibility. Here's the abstract: This study builds on the Bureau’s earlier work and examines the relationship between geography and credit invisibility. The importance of geography in accessing credit has been long-standing concern for […]