As Jerry Hirsch explains, the number of vehicles recalled this year for safety problems has reached an all-time high (breaking the previous high established in 2004). It's June.
Law professor Christopher Drahozal has written Error Correction and the Supreme Court's Arbitration Docket. Here is the abstract: Supreme Court Justices from William Taft to Stephen Breyer have repeated the maxim that the “Supreme Court is not a court of error correction.” When it comes to arbitration law, however, a number of the Court’s cases […]
Here. A TV comic excursion into the law of supplements (HT: Charles Shafer).
The Supreme Court held this morning in Halliburton Co. v. Erica P. John Fund, No. 13-317 (June 23, 2014), that the presumption of shareholder reliance in private securities-fraud class actions established by the Court in Basic Inc. v. Levinson, 485 U.S. 224 (1985), should not be overruled. It agreed, however, with the defendant Haliburton that […]
Catherine M. Sharkey of NYU has written Agency Coordination in Consumer Protection, 2013 University of Chicago Legal Forum 329. Here's the abstract: The federalization of consumer protection has created thorny issues of agency coordination. When multiple federal agencies interpret and enforce the same statute, should a single agency’s interpretation be accorded Chevron deference? Should it […]
In a unanimous opinion today in Lane v. Franks, the Court held that an employee who was fired by a public employer for giving subpoenaed judicial testimony about his state-funded program could maintain a claim for First Amendment retaliation. The key issue in the case was whether testifying was part of the employee's job responsibilities […]
Tess Wilkinson‐Ryan of Penn has written A Psychological Account of Consent to Fine Print, 99 Iowa Law Review 1745 (2014). Wilkinson-Ryan has a Ph.D in psychology as well as a law degree, and so brings to bear a different perspective in evaluating consumer reactions to fine print. I found this article useful in the research I'm […]
For those of you who haven't been following the fight to unionize NCAA football players, spearheaded by Northwestern players, this Daily Show piece is a great summary of the issue. (Here is ESPN's summary of the state of affairs: players have voted on whether to unionize — results not yet known. An NLRB regional office ruled […]
…is the subtitle of this Al Jazeera America piece on the use of tribal sovereign immunity to shield payday lenders from the reach of consumer protection laws (while, incidentally, providing little benefit to the tribes themselves). As the article explains: Tribal sovereignty allows the rancherias’ businesses to claim immunity from state usury laws, making them […]
by Paul Alan Levy Take a gander of this image: do you think, or even suspect, that Philip Morris, the maker of world-renowned Marlboro cigarettes, might approve this image, or might indeed be offering it for sale? If so, you might well be one of the morons in a hurry that Philip Morris and Roberta […]