The Washington Post reports: Goldman Sachs said Thursday it will pay roughly $5 billion to settle federal and state probes of its role in the sale of shoddy mortgages in the years leading to the housing bubble and subsequent financial crisis. Coming nearly eight years after the crisis, the settlement is by far the largest […]
by Paul Alan Levy A few years ago, Gordon Austin, a Georgia dentist from the small town of Carrollton, about 50 miles west of Atlanta, was indicted on multiple charges stemming in part from Medicare fraud and in part for a series of incidents in which he beat patients with a dental instrument. According to […]
The late Jean Braucher of Arizona and Angela K. Littwin of Texas have written Examination as a Method of Consumer Protection, 87 Temple Law Review, 807 (2015). Here is the abstract: Lack of compliance with consumer protection law has been a crucial problem in the field for as long as such law has existed. The Consumer […]
Gerrymandering — the drawing of district lines for the purpose of giving one candidate or party an electoral advantage — dates back to the Founding. (It was named for Elbridge Gerry, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and later Vice President under James Madison.) It's alive and well today, and as President Obama pointed out […]
The Federal Trade Commission reports that pharmaceutical companies entered into substantially fewer potential pay-for-delay patent dispute settlements in fiscal year 2014. Under such settlements, brand-name drug companies pay generic companies to delay entry of less costly drugs onto the market. In FTC v. Actavis (2013), the U.S. Supreme Court held that a brand-name drug manufacturer’s payment […]
By age 67, you'll need 10 times your salary, according to one investment firm — a more aggressive target than it had previously recommended. The Post explains the details, here.
"The plaintiffs allege Uber misclassified them as independent contractors, effectively stripping them of rights such as business-expense reimbursements and gratuities," explains the L.A. Times. Read more here.
Here. An excerpt: [The Chamber] slammed the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for sometimes pursuing violators of securities law in the comfort of its in-house courts rather than try the cases in the public courts. There are "substantial differences" in the processes used in the two forums, the Chamber's Center for Capital Markets Competitiveness wrote […]
Looking in particular at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's complaint process, that's the issue addressed by law prof Angela Littwin in Why Process Complaints? Then and Now. Here's the abstract: The creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) established the first comprehensive federal forum for processing consumer complaints about financial products and services. The […]
As NPR explains this morning, your chances of winning the $1.4 billion Powerball jackpot are 1000 times worse than picking a particular penny out of a stack the height of the Empire State Building.