The Real News Network has produced Will a $10 Minimum Wage Get All Working Americans Out of Poverty? As its title suggests, RNN's story addresses whether President Obama and the Democratic party's proposal to take the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour will provide a non-poverty-level wage. To watch the story, you can click on […]
by Jeff Sovern There's been a lot of discussion recently about whether the Post Office should offer banking services. The idea is that it could serve the unbanked, and that its many existing branches would cover the entire country (Disclosure: one of my brothers works for the Postal Service, though we haven't discussed this idea). For […]
Today the Supreme Court refused the City of Burbank's request to rehear Dahlia v. Rodriguez, in which the en banc Ninth Circuit reinstated the claim of a Burbank police officer who was suspended for reporting that his fellow officers were beating suspects — a victory for the First Amendment and for public oversight of law […]
Following up on our recent coverage of the FCC's efforts to promote net neutrality (see here and here), it's worth noting this Washington Post analysis of a recent deal between Comcast and Neflix. The headline is a good summary: "Comcast’s deal with Netflix makes network neutrality obsolete."
by Deepak Gupta Despite an unusually full-throated public-relations campaign and amicus effort by the tort-reform lobby, the Supreme Court this morning turned aside three petitions for certiorari from the Sixth, Seventh, and Ninth Circuits concerning the propriety of class certification in cases alleging that moldy washing machines sold to consumers were defective. Today's denial is […]
We have covered extensively (for instance, here, here, and here) the ban on the sale of large, sugary drinks by New York City's health department. A state-law-based challenge to the ban by merchants and others succeeded in a New York trial court and an intermediate court of appeals. But last October New York's highest court […]
Mark Elliott Budnitz of Georgia State has written Buyer Beware: Georgia Consumers Can't Rely on the Fair Business Practices Act, 6 John Marshall Law Journal 507 (2013). Here is the abstract: In Novare Group, Inc. v. Sarif, the Georgia Supreme Court rejected the plaintiffs' claim that the defendant brokers and developers violated the Georgia Fair […]
by Brian Wolfman The popular "cloud" storage service Dropbox has added a forced, pre-dispute arbitration clause to its standard consumer contract. As explained by Adam Levitin over at Credit Slips, Dropbox's clause also bans class actions, both in court and in arbitration. What I like about Levitin's post is that it stresses that the problem with […]
The Federal Reserve just issued its most recent quarterly report on household debt and credit. Though it reviews household debt and credit of all sorts, I was interested in what it had to say about student-loan debt: • Outstanding student loan balances reported on credit reports increased to $1.08 trillion (+$53 billion) as of December […]
by Paul Alan Levy Recently I had the pleasure of participating in a moot court at Georgetown Law Center’s Supreme Court Institute for the upcoming Supreme Court argument in Octane Fitness v. Icon Health & Fitness, in which the Court will have the opportunity to nix the very restrictive standard applied by the Federal Circuit […]