Frank Pasquale of Maryland has a terrific op-ed in today's Times, The Dark Market for Personal Data, about lists of consumers with various characteristics. An excerpt: There are three problems with these lists. First, they are often inaccurate. For example, as The Washington Post reported, an Arkansas woman found her credit history and job prospects wrecked […]
by Paul Alan Levy In the short space of a few days, the House and Senate of the Pennsylvania legislature have passed a bill allowing judges to issue injunctions, or grant any other “appropriate relief” if there is “conduct” by a criminal “offender” that “perpetuates the continuing effect of the crime […]
by Paul Alan Levy Last February, I discussed on this blog our appeal on behalf of an Alabama law firm and about a hundred of their clients who were subjected to an exceptionally broad gag order that forbade them from saying anything publicly or even privately about an extermination company that they had sued for […]
We've recommended before the insightful investigative journalism of Jake Halpern on the debt collection industry (see here for a post earlier this month and here for a story from 2010). Last week, Halpern appeared on Fresh Air to discuss his new book, Bad Paper: Chasing Debt from Wall Street to the Underworld. Eye opening and […]
A study released today reports on class actions that have "helped victims of corporate law-breaking and led to changes in corporate behavior that protect us all from many types of illegal conduct." Prepared by the Center for Justice and Democracy, the study looks at more than 150 class actions that have been litigated since 2005 […]
by Jeff Sovern The op-ed is here, at Forbes.com. Except that if you want to find out why everything Warren said is wrong, maybe the op-ed wouldn't be the place to look. Here's the lead: Why do people borrow? To hear law professor turned Senator Elizabeth Warren, it is because they are seduced by rapacious […]
Yesterday, the Washington Post endorsed Brian Frosh for Attorney General of Maryland. Among his opponents' weaknesses, according to the Post, is that he "wants to promote arbitration as an alternative to consumers suing businesses." On the other side of the issue, a congressional candidate in Virginia (running for an open seat in the D.C. suburb […]
The legalization of marijunana creates economic winners and losers. One loser is the private prison industry, which is lobbying against legalization, as explained in this article by Kendall Bentsen.
Thomas A. Durkin and Gregory Elliehausen, both of the Fed, and Todd J. Zywicki of George Mason have written An Assessment of Behavioral Law and Economics Contentions and What We Know Empirically About Credit Card Use by Consumers. Here is an abstract: “Behavioral Law and Economics” (BLE) is a specialized component of the legal literature […]
Julia S. Cheney, Robert M. Hunt, Vyacheslav Mikhed, and Dubravka Ritter all of the Philadelphia Fed, have written Identity Theft as a Teachable Moment. Here is the abstract: This paper examines how instances of identity theft that are sufficiently severe to induce consumers to place an extended fraud alert in their credit reports affect their […]