D.C. Circuit holds that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s governing structure is unconstitutional

Read the court's very long opinion. The basic problem identified by the D.C. Circuit is that the CFPB is an independent agency run not by a multi-member commission (the members of which serve as checks on one another), but by one director (who may only be removed by the President for cause, see 12 U.S.C. […]

Dozens of suspicious court cases, with missing defendants, aim at getting web pages taken down or deindexed

BY PAUL ALAN LEVY AND EUGENE VOLOKH There are about 25 court cases throughout the country that have a suspicious profile: All involve allegedly self-represented plaintiffs, yet they have similar snippets of legalese that suggest a common organization behind them. (A few others, having a slightly different profile, involve actual lawyers.) All the ostensible defendants ostensibly […]

Consumer Clinical Law Professors Comment on CFPB’s Arbitration Rule

by Jeff Sovern I meant to post this a long time ago, but then I got caught up teaching an intensive class, followed by an overload and didn't get to it. Anyway, here is a comment on the CFPB's proposed arbitration rule posted by law professors teaching consumer law clinics (we had previously covered a law […]

Richard Marcus Article: Optimism about Class Actions in the 21st Century

Richard Marcus of Hastings has written Bending in the Breeze: American Class Actions in the Twenty-First Century, 65 DePaul Law Review (2016). Here's the abstract:: It is always better to have the breeze at your back, but that surely has not recently been the case for class action proponents. At the risk of overstating, there is […]

CFPB issues rule on prepaid cards

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has finalized a set of rules intended to protect prepaid account users. The new rule requires financial institutions to limit consumers’ losses when funds are stolen or cards are lost, investigate and resolve errors, and give consumers free and easy access to account information. The CFPB also finalized new “Know […]

Change in the Law Justifies a Change in the Analysis of Arbitration Waiver.

  The Third Circuit recently held that title insurers did not waive their ability to compel individual arbitration when attempting to do so earlier would have been futile under then-existing law. In Chassen, et al. v. Fidelity National Financial, Inc., et al., (Sept. 8, 2016), plaintiffs sought to recover hundreds of millions of dollars in claimed […]

Court imposes $1.3 billion judgment against defendants behind AMG payday lending scheme

The Federal Trade Commission announced today that, at the FTC's request, a federal court in Nevada has found that racecar driver Scott A. Tucker and several corporate defendants in a Kansas City-based payday lending scheme violated Section 5 of the FTC Act and has ordered them to pay $1.3 billion for deceiving consumers across the […]

Food testing and proof of injury in class-action food-related litigation

That's the topic of this article by Jeff Lingwall. Here is the abstract: This Article examines the emerging use of “food forensics” to discover injury in class action litigation. Based on increased public interest in what goes inside food, plaintiffs have begun relying on statistical and chemical testing to verify label claims. The test results often spur […]

“How to get justice after the Wells Fargo scandal”

From a Washington Post column today by Katrina vanden Heuvel: Wells Fargo’s abuse of its customers — its employees opened some 2 million accounts and credit cards for depositors who may not have wanted them — has sparked deserved outrage. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D.-Mass.) charged Wells Fargo chair and chief executive John Stumpf with “gutless […]