The New York City Department of Consumer Affairs announced this week that it has reached a settlement with collection company National Credit Adjusters (NCA) over collections on illegal payday loans. The Kansas-based company will pay approximately $1 million in restitution and the Department estimates over 4,600 New Yorkers will be eligible for compensation. NCA will […]
With the news that ESPN will become available through a streaming service, it looks like the cable market will be in for a shakeup, including potentially one that forces cable providers to "unbundle" their channel packages and enable consumers to pay only for the channels they want. This sounds like a good thing, right? Not […]
Alexandra Power Everhart Sickler of North Dakota has written The Truth Shall Set You Free: Explaining Judicial Hostility to the Truth in Lending Act’s Right to Rescind a Mortgage Loan, forthcoming in the Rutgers Journal of Law and Urban Policy. Here is the abstract: The Supreme Court is entertaining a divide among the federal circuits […]
That is the question raised by the incoming Chair and Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee in response to FBI assertions that the agency is entitled to use a device masquerading as a cell-phone tower to intercept your calls and texts in public. The Daily Dot explains the troubling technology at issue: The Stingray […]
(HT: Rosemary Shahan). Might be worth assigning to students learning about fraud and UDAP statutes.
by Jeff Sovern A professor who is new to teaching consumer law has asked about skills exercises (also called active learning exercises) professors could require of students. I suggested having a student write a demand letter that didn’t violate the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (or that did), writing a privacy policy, or perhaps one of the many […]
…is the title of this NPR piece, which examines both how easy it is to lose one's license because of poverty (in Wisconsin, for instance, failure to pay a ticket can result in a two-year suspension, which is harsher than the penalty for either drunk driving or a hit-and-run), and how losing a driver's license […]
Here's what the Food and Drug Administration just said about so-called dietary supplements and foods claimed to promote weight loss: If you find yourself making this common New Year’s resolution, know this: many so-called “miracle” weight loss supplements and foods (including teas and coffees) don’t live up to their claims. Worse, they can cause serious […]
Mary L. Heen of Richmond has written Nondiscrimination in Insurance: The Next Chapter, 49 Georgia Law Review (2014-2015). Here is the abstract: For nearly 150 years, American insurance companies have engaged in race and gender pricing practices that would be illegal if followed today by any other major commercial enterprise. The insurance industry has defended its […]
A couple of significant pro-consumer, pro-privacy rulings over the last two weeks of 2014: First, a federal district court in Minnesota rejected the argument that putative class of Target consumers harmed by the retail giant's data breach lacked standing to sue over the breach. As Law360 reports, the court "concluded that the plaintiffs' assertions that […]