Guest post by Stephen Raher Each year, over 12 million people are released from jails and prisons in the United States. When this happens, the correctional facility often owes money to the person being released. This could be money that the person earned while incarcerated, gifts from family, or perhaps funds that a person had they were […]
Two interesting pieces on this ever-pressing subject, one short and one long. The short one is from Nate Silver's incisive fivethirtyeight.com, where an article invites you in its title to "Meet The 80 People Who Are As Rich As Half The World." More interesting than the people on the list (some of whom you've surely […]
Nancy S. Kim of California Western and D. A. Jeremy Telman of Valparaiso have written Internet Giants as Quasi-Governmental Actors and the Limits of Contractual Consent, Forthcoming in the Missouri Law Review. Here is the abstract: Although the government’s data-mining program relied heavily on information and technology that the government received from private companies, relatively little […]
In an encouraging sign that courts are taking health and safety seriously in the neighborhood context, the D.C. Superior Court has issued an injunction against a man whose smoking fills his neighbors’ home with smoke, which has woken them up at night coughing and subjects their 18-month-old daughter to secondhand smoke, according to the nuisance […]
In the Credit CARD Act of 2009 Congress sought to tame what it viewed as excesses of the credit-card industry. Go here to view the Act's basic reforms. Since the law went into effect about five years ago, commentators and researchers have tried to assess its effectiveness. Read our prior posts on the topic here, here, here, here, […]
Here. An excerpt: The reality is that credit-reporting firms have been required for decades to ensure the accuracy of consumers' files. They're not doing us a favor. They're just finally saying that they'll follow the law. "For years, the credit-reporting agencies have scoffed at the law," said Scott Maurer, a law professor at Santa Clara […]
The Huffington Post reports today: Facing the prospect of imminent oversight by a newly created government regulator, the much-reviled payday loan industry’s lobbying machine surged into action. The campaign to blunt the power of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau included the usual monetary contributions to key lawmakers and hiring of well-connected lobbyists. But one little-known […]
The New York Times reports today on financial companies' use of forced arbitration provisions to eliminate servicemembers' rights. Over the years, Congress has given service members a number of protections — some dating to the Civil War — from repossessions and foreclosures. Efforts to maintain that special status for service members has run into resistance […]
Prolific class action scholar (and former Scalia clerk) Brian Fitzpatrick of Vanderbilt Law has just posted to SSRN an interesting new paper foreseeing and lamenting the effects of his former boss's handiwork in AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion and American Express v. Italian Colors (both cases in which I had the privilege of representing the losing […]
by Steve Gardner On Friday the 13th, the Ninth Circuit issued an opinion roundly rejecting almost every defense food companies use to try to avoid getting to the truth of the matter, in Reid v. Johnson & Johnson. The summary by court staff sets up the facts well: McNeil declared on Benecol’s label that the […]