An additional tidbit on tribal sovereign immunity and payday lending

Scott noted earlier today that the California Supreme Court will hear a case posing the following question: Is a payday lender that is formally owned by a Native American tribe but run by a third-party who keeps most of the proceeds protected by tribal sovereign immunity? So, the U.S. Supreme Court just this morning issued […]

California Supreme Court to review “rent-a-tribe” arrangement for payday lenders

Last week the California Supreme Court granted review in People v. Miami Nation Enterprises, which presents the issue of when a payday lending operation that is formally owned by a Native American tribe but run by a third-party who keeps most of the proceeds is protected by tribal sovereign immunity. The practice of payday lenders […]

DC Circuit Vacates Decision Allowing Serial Mass Copyright Litigant Access to Users’ Identifying Information

by Paul Alan Levy In an opinion issued this morning, the D.C. Circuit unanimously reversed a trial court ruling that compelled several ISP's to provide identifying information for more than a thousand anonymous users who were sued a maker of pornographic movies for allegedly using the BitTorrent protocol to provide access to copies of an […]

Assessing the Card Act five years after enactment

Remember the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009 (better known as the CARD Act)? The CARD Act made it more difficult for credit card companies to retroactively increase rates on existing balances or to impose large late fees, and it drastically curbed overlimit fees. The Act also sought to force credit card […]

Non-disparagement clauses in consumer contracts and the Kleargear litigation

We have discussed the increasing use by companies of non-disparagement clauses in take-it-or-leave-it consumer contracts, where the consumer "agrees" not to say anything critical of a company from which it buys something  Go, for instance, here, discussing the use of these clauses in mortgage loan-modification contracts. And we have discussed repeatedly (go, for instance, here […]

Tara Twomey on the Intersection of Reverse Mortgages and Bankruptcy

Tara Twomey of the National Consumer Law Center and National Consumer Bankruptcy Rights Center has written Crossing Paths: The Intersection of Reverse Mortgages and Bankruptcy.  Here is the abstract: The senior population of the United States is expected to grow rapidly over the next twenty years.  Rather than enjoying their golden years, increasingly older Americans […]

The Hill Reports on the GOP’s Continuing Effort to Cripple the CFPB

by Jeff Sovern Here. Eleven proposed bills this time.  It creates an interesting contrast with the just issued CFPB's Supervisory Highlights report, which reports, for example, that the CFPB found that one collection firm violated debt collection laws approximately 17,000 times and a creditor has been selling debts on which consumers were no longer liable.  […]

Non-Disparagement Clauses in Loan Modifications

Mortgage servicers increasingly are including non-disparagement clauses in loan modification agreements, including ordinary loan modifications (i.e., those that are not negotiated in settlement of litigation). In at least one instance, Ocwen, the largest non-bank servicer of mortgages in the U.S. thanks to a number of acquisitions in recent years, sought to impose a non-disparagement provision […]