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 […]
I’m trying to get a handle on just how vulnerable law schools are to an adversarial presidential administration. Here’s my list of potential vulnerabilities so far: Federal grants. Because few, if any, law schools receive substantial federal grants, this lever is not very effective against law schools—directly. But see item 5 below. Foreign Students. Law […]
So Bonnie Eslinger reports in Law360’s American Arbitration Assoc. Accused Of Pro-Corp. Monopoly. The plaintiffs claim violations of state and federal antitrust laws. Here are the first two paragraphs of the complaint: This case is about the predatorial behavior of an arbitration association in its attempt to race to the bottom of the barrel of […]
This week, the Senate advanced the GENIUS Act, which would establish a (too-weak) regulatory framework for “stablecoins” and other digital currency. Missouri Senator Josh Hawley has proposed an amendment to that bill which would prohibit credit card interest rates above 10%. The banking industry is not pleased.
Here. Finally the NYT runs an op-ed about the CFPB! And it’s a good one. Here are the first two paragraphs: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is turning into the Corporate Financial Protection Bureau. President Trump’s C.F.P.B. has not only ceased to pursue its mandate; it has taken the unprecedented step of unwinding prior victories […]
On May 8 and 9, President Trump attempted to fire the three Democratic members of the Consumer Protection Safety Commission. Today, represented by my colleagues at Public Citizen, those commissioners filed suit asking that the purported terminations be set aside. The press release is available at https://www.citizen.org/news/trump-firing-consumer-product-safety-commissioners-was-unlawful/ and the complaint is available at https://www.citizen.org/wp-content/uploads/ECF-1-Complaint-3.pdf.
Here, at Penn’s Regulatory Review. The entire piece merits reading, and is short, but here’s my favorite paragraph: The primary reason the CFPB gave for pulling the guidance documents back is its “current policy to avoid issuing guidance except where necessary and where compliance burdens would be reduced rather than increased.” In a very real sense, this […]