by Jeff Sovern Here. The symposium, on Ben-Shahar's and Schneider's More Than You Wanted to Know: The Failure of Mandated Disclosure, has been running since last week and features contributions by names that will be familiar to regular readers of consumer law literature, including Lauren Willis of Loyola-LA, David Vladeck of Georgetown, Florencia Marotta-Wurgler of NYU, Nancy Kim of Cal Western, […]
Both funny and depressing. Either way, worth a watch (about 10 minutes) to learn about our elected leaders' relationship to science.
The Reporters' Committee for Freedom of the Press and eight news organizations submitted comments to that effect to the CFPB. The comments specifically ask the agency to abandon a proposal to disclose complaints only when the author "opts in" to having the complaints shared. "The relationship between consumers and financial institutions remains a topic of […]
This article in the Federal Times from Ruth Y. Goldway, Chair of the Postal Regulatory Commission, argues that her agency's program of having a designated public representative explicitly representing the public interest in the agency decisionmaking process improves outcomes. As Goldway explains: [T]he public representatives identify and discuss issues that would not otherwise be fully […]
The Washington Post offers this encouraging story from the Pacific Northwest, where a Seattle suburb's decision to raise the minimum wage has not caused the disruption that opponents predicted. And NPR's Planet Money has this story about a shopping mall on the boundary between two California cities with different wage laws; businesses and workers have […]
In more FTC news, the agency announced yesterday that online review site Yelp, Inc., and mobile app developer TinyCo, Inc., agreed to settle separate FTC charges "that they improperly collected children’s information in violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, Rule." Under the settlements, Yelp will pay a $450,000 civil penalty, and […]
From the FTC's press release: At the Federal Trade Commission’s request, a U.S. district court in Missouri has temporarily halted an online payday lending scheme that allegedly bilked consumers out of tens of millions of dollars by trapping them into loans they never authorized and then using the supposed “loans” as a pretext to take […]
The CFPB announced yesterday that it is proposing to oversee larger non-bank auto finance companies, which would be a first at the federal level. At the same time, the CFPB released a report detailing auto-lending discrimination at banks. "The report highlights that the Bureau’s supervisory actions against banks will result in about $56 million in […]
Following in the footsteps of California's new law barring the use of non-disparagement clauses and providing a private cause of action for seeking or threatening to enforce one, today Reps. Eric Swalwell and Brad Sherman (both of California) introduced in Congress the "Consumer Review Freedom Act" that would render non-disparagement clauses unenforceable nationwide. The text […]
As we have discussed, last week California passed a law barring the use of non-disparagement clauses and providing a private cause of action for seeking or threatening to enforce one, or for "otherwise penaliz[ing] a consumer for making any statement protected under this section" (that is, a statement "regarding the seller or lessor or its […]