Federal judge wants to bury summary judgment for many reasons, but especially because it harms employment-discrimination plaintiffs

Yep, that's the topic of Essay: From the 'No Spittin', No Cussin' and No Summary Judgment' Days of Employment Discrimination Litigation to the 'Defendant's Summary Judgment Affirmed Without Comment' Days: One Judge's Four-Decade Perspective by U.S. District Judge Mark W. Bennett. Here is the no-nonsense abstract: Nearly seventy-five years after its birth, the time has […]

Is the “economic recovery” really a continuing recession for most Americans?

That's what the economic data suggest, at least the data through 2012. After reproducing what Matthew Yglesias calls the most important chart about the American economy you'll see this year, Yglesias explains: For a long time, most of the gains from economic growth went to the bottom 90 percent of the income distribution. And, after […]

Department of Defense Proposes Military Lending Act Regulations to Protect Soldiers

The Times has the story under the headline Tougher Shield for Soldiers Against Predatory Lenders.  The proposed regulation closes loopholes like these described in the Times story: The law set a 36 percent interest rate cap on a range of high-cost loan products. But the protections applied to a narrow sliver of loans, covering only […]

Housing first

Check out an illuminating New Yorker commentary about the success of government programs providing homes for homeless people. Many policy approaches to homelessness assume that society should help homeless people get other aspects of their lives in order before they transition to permanent housing. That’s the wrong order, argues the New Yorker’s James Surowiecki, with […]

Brescia & Martin on Local Government Responses to Underwater Mortgages

Raymond H. Brescia and Nicholas M. Martin, both of Albany have written The Price of Crisis: Eminent Domain, Local Governments, and the Value of Underwater Mortgages, forthcoming in 24 Temple Political & Civil Rights Law Review (2014).  Here's the abstract:   Governments at all levels in the U.S. have deployed a range of tactics to […]

Collecting debts on cars in the computerized world

Read this article by Michael Corkery and Jessica Sliver-Greenberg. Here's an excerpt: The thermometer showed a 103.5-degree fever, and her 10-year-old’s asthma was flaring up. Mary Bolender, who lives in Las Vegas, needed to get her daughter to an emergency room, but her 2005 Chrysler van would not start. The cause was not a mechanical […]

ContractsProf Blog Symposium on Ben-Shahar & Schneider’s Book on Disclosure

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, […]