CFPB issues rule to help mortgage servicers communicate with certain borrowers at risk of foreclosure

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau today issued an interim final rule and a proposed rule "to provide mortgage servicers more flexibility and certainty around requirements to communicate with certain borrowers under the Bureau’s 2016 mortgage servicing amendments. The interim final rule gives servicers more flexibility regarding when to communicate about foreclosure prevention options with borrowers […]

Supreme Court hears argument in major arbitration cases

Our readers may be interested in this story by Michael Scarcella on the contentious oral argument today before the Supreme Court in Epic Systems v. Lewis (and two cases consolidated with it), perhaps one of the most important arbitration cases the Court has ever heard. The question presented by one of the pro-arbitration parties is Whether an agreement that […]

Treat guns like consumer products

“This must stop. It is positively infuriating that my colleagues in Congress are so afraid of the gun industry that they pretend there aren’t public policy responses to this epidemic. There are, and the thoughts and prayers of politicians are cruelly hollow if they are paired with legislative indifference. It’s time for Congress to get […]

Recents announcements from DOJ’s Consumer Protection Branch

Below are announcements from the Department of Justice's Consumer Protection Branch from July through September. September 27, 2017 – District Court Enters Permanent Injunction Against Illinois Caviar Supplier to Prevent Distribution of Adulterated Food September 26, 2017 – District Court Enters Permanent Injunction Against Two New Jersey Companies and Two Individuals to Stop Distribution of […]

Ascertainability and cy pres in class actions

Those are topics of Justifying Class Action Limits: Parsing the Debates over Ascertainability and Cy Pres by law prof Robert Bone. Here's the abstract: The federal class action has lost its way. It was created about fifty years ago in a major revision to Rule 23 that envisioned a functional aggregation device aimed at promoting litigation efficiency […]

Did Equifax Lobby Against the Laws that Forced it to Disclose its Breach?

by Jeff Sovern As has been widely reported, Equifax waited about six weeks to disclose its breach, which makes me wonder if we would ever have learned about the breach if the laws requiring disclosures of breaches didn’t exist.  And in recent years, Equifax has lobbied aggressively on breach laws.  All this left me curious […]

Issacharoff Book Chapter on Class Actions

Samuel Issacharoff of NYU has written Collective Action and Class Action, in THE CLASS ACTION EFFECT: FROM THE LEGISLATOR’S IMAGINATION TO TODAY’S USES AND PRACTICES, (Catherine Piché, ed., Éditions Yvon Blais, 2018 Forthcoming).  Here is the abstract: Over the past 25 years, class actions have emerged as a central feature of Canadian law. The conceptual […]

Paper: Consumer Access to Credit Decreases in States Whose Senators Become Powerful

Pat Akey of the University of Toronto – Rotman School of Management, Rawley Heimer of the Boston College – Department of Finance, and Stefan Lewellen of the London Business School have written Politicizing Consumer Credit. Here's the abstract: Using proprietary credit bureau data, we find that consumers’ access to credit decreases by 4.5 percent–8 percent […]