After the City of Edina, Minnesota, banned the sale of flavored tobacco products, R.J. Reynolds and other tobacco industry companies sued, arguing the law is preempted by the federal Tobacco Control Act. In a unanimous per curiam opinion, the Eighth Circuit affirmed the district court’s decision holding that the law is not preempted. Agreeing with […]
Earlier today the Supreme Court announced that it would take the case in which the Fifth Circuit had held the CFPB’s funding mechanism was unconstitutional, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau v. Community Financial Services Association of America, Limited. The Bureau had asked the Court to hear the case during the current term but the Court instead decided to […]
In Consumer Law as Work Law (forthcoming Calif. L. Rev. 2024), law professor Jonathan Harris describes the possibilities and challenges of turning to consumer law as part of an integrated work law to help remediate the bargaining power asymmetries between firms and workers. Here is the abstract: In recent decades, firms have radically transformed labor […]
The question in the case, Santos v. Yellowfin Loan Servicing Corp., No. 22-0910 (Tex. S. Ct.), is whether a claim to collect a deficiency judgment on a second mortgage accrues when that judgment is entered or whenever in the future the lender (or its successor in interest) decides to “accelerate” the original mortgage loan. Lenders […]
Abigail Faust of The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute has written Regulating Excessive Credit, forthcoming in the Wisconsin Law Review. Here is the abstract: Consumer financial protection law is dominated by ex-ante, contract-centered regulatory measures. But these measures largely fail to curb lenders’ incentive to lend beyond consumers’ ability to repay. The Article thus suggests an alternative […]
In its decisions in Spokeo v. Robins and TransUnion v. Ramirez, the Supreme Court held that consumers lack Article III standing to challenge violations of the Fair Credit Reporting Act absent the showing of some concrete harm beyond the publication of inaccurate credit information. On Tuesday, the Fourth Circuit confronted how those decisions interact with […]
An amicus curiae brief filed today on behalf of three former clients whose right to use trademarks for purposes of parody we defended on a number of occasions over the past two decades, urges the Supreme Court to uphold the Rogers v. Grimaldi standard as a screen to weed out weak trademark infringement claims brought […]
“By listening to and recording users’ voices, voice assistants gather large amounts of personal data that technology companies can share with third parties. Technology experts expect the voice assistant market to continue growing, but there are few federal regulations that apply to voice-activated technology. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has provided recommendations to help […]
A recent Washington Post article looks at “a big, fat map of credit scores reproduced from a recent economics paper” and finds “any number of tantalizing questions.” But “most intrigu[ing]” is “that big band of credit-score calamity that stretches across the American South”: “Almost every corner of America’s most populous region — every race, every […]
The New York Times reports that Louis Vuitton, perhaps the most notorious trademark bully of them all, used a Joan Mitchell painting in one of its advertisements after her foundation repeatedly refused permission because she had, and it has, a strict policy against commercial use of her work. The Joan Mitchell Foundation has sent a […]