For those of you who have been following the saga of Palmer v. KlearGear (see here for a summary), a big development this week: On Wednesday afternoon in Salt Lake City, after hearing testimony from the plaintiffs John and Jen Palmer about the damages they suffered as a result of their ordeal, the judge awarded […]
Christopher R. Drahozal of Kansas has written FAA Preemption after Concepcion, 35 Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law 153 (2014, Forthcoming). Here is the abstract: AT&T Mobility LLC v. Concepcion is an important case for its holding that the FAA preempts application of state unconscionability doctrine to invalidate an arbitration clause with a class […]
Read this piece by law professor and dean Erwin Chemerinsky.
The New York Court of Appeals — New York's highest court — today threw out the New York City Board of Health's ban on the sale of large sugary drinks. The ban was a significant component of former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg's fight against obesity. Read the court's 4-2 decision and Michael Grynbaum's article about […]
Eleven auto safety and other consumer groups have petitioned the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), asking the agency to take enforcement action against the major national used-car seller CarMax. The groups say that CarMax claims its cars go through a rigorous safety inspection but that, in fact, CarMax does not fix defects that are the subject […]
As Jerry Hirsch explains, the number of vehicles recalled this year for safety problems has reached an all-time high (breaking the previous high established in 2004). It's June.
Law professor Christopher Drahozal has written Error Correction and the Supreme Court's Arbitration Docket. Here is the abstract: Supreme Court Justices from William Taft to Stephen Breyer have repeated the maxim that the “Supreme Court is not a court of error correction.” When it comes to arbitration law, however, a number of the Court’s cases […]
Here. A TV comic excursion into the law of supplements (HT: Charles Shafer).
The Supreme Court held this morning in Halliburton Co. v. Erica P. John Fund, No. 13-317 (June 23, 2014), that the presumption of shareholder reliance in private securities-fraud class actions established by the Court in Basic Inc. v. Levinson, 485 U.S. 224 (1985), should not be overruled. It agreed, however, with the defendant Haliburton that […]
Catherine M. Sharkey of NYU has written Agency Coordination in Consumer Protection, 2013 University of Chicago Legal Forum 329. Here's the abstract: The federalization of consumer protection has created thorny issues of agency coordination. When multiple federal agencies interpret and enforce the same statute, should a single agency’s interpretation be accorded Chevron deference? Should it […]