Here. Excerpt: Thousands of angry consumers and business representatives have flooded the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau with comments on its May proposal to block companies from forcing customers to take disputes to arbitration instead of joining group lawsuits. Sentiment in the unusually high number of comment letters, more than 8,380 have already been filed though […]
Banks want to keep their customers out of court. But consumers overwhelmingly want the right to take banks to court if they have a dispute. Those are the findings of research released today by the Pew Charitable Trusts. Pew studied two subjects: (1) the use of arbitration clauses, class-action bans, and jury trial waivers by […]
The Supreme Court's decisions in Bell Atlantic v. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544 (2007), and Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 556 U.S. 662 (2009), heightened the standard for fact pleading in federal court. These cases were generally understood to mean that plaintiffs would have to plead facts more specifically than they had been to avoid dismissal of their federal-court […]
by Jeff Sovern Here, titled The Risks of Unfettered Capitalism. The first and last paragraphs read: Capitalism may be the best economic system ever devised, but one of its drawbacks is that it provides financial incentives to harm and even kill people. Just ask those people who say they have been victimized bycigarettes, predatory lenders, Volkswagen diesel […]
by Jeff Sovern As reported by the Times last week, patients who are held at a hospital for "observation," even if that observation lasts days, but not formally admitted, and later released to a nursing home, won't have their stay in the nursing home covered by Medicare. That stay can cost tens of thousands of dollars. So Congress passed a […]
by Jeff Sovern Recently I saw an off-Broadway play by Norman Shabel, A Class Act. Shabel is a longtime practicing lawyer and the play is about negotiations to settle a toxic waste class action case (not a consumer case). Nevertheless, the lawyers note that the case can proceed as a class action because the victims–people […]
He writes that "Both books examine the intersection of competition, privacy and consumer protection law." One is Big Data and Competition Policy, written with Allen Grunes. Here's a description from Amazon's web site: Big Data and Big Analytics are a big deal today. Big Data is playing a pivotal role in many companies' strategic decision-making. […]
by Jenny Hyde The Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division seek public comment on a proposed update of the Antitrust Guidelines for the Licensing of Intellectual Property, also known as the IP Licensing Guidelines. The IP Licensing Guidelines, which state the agencies’ antitrust enforcement policy with respect to the licensing of […]
by Jeff Sovern Here, an op-ed by people from Ohio State, Catherine Montalto, Associate Professor of Consumer Sciences, and Anne McDaniel , Senior Associate Director there. Excerpt: [D]ata from our study showed over half of student loan users tried to borrow as little as possible (52 percent). Additionally, 38 percent considered the total amount of debt that […]