Price Controls on Payment Card Interchange Fees: The U.S. Experience

That's the name of this article by Zywicki, Manne, and Morris. Here is the abstract:  The Durbin Amendment to the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation capped debit card interchange fees for banks with assets of $10 billion. Credit card and prepaid card interchange fees were not regulated. The cap, which took effect on October 11, 2011, […]

The Research Integrity Council, the CFPB, and Transparency

by Jeff Sovern Last March, the CFPB Monitor Blog, announced  that "a group of representatives from across a variety of industries met to discuss the formation of a Research Integrity Council (RIC), the purpose of which will be to make recommendations to improve the quality and veracity of the research being conducted by the CFPB […]

Credit Discrimination and Same Sex Couples

by Jeff Sovern Our casebook includes a problem raising the question of whether discrimination against same sex couples in the granting of credit violates ECOA (some states have statutes explicitly barring discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, see, e.g., N.Y. Exec. L. 296-a(1)(a), and a HUD rule bars discrimination on the basis of sexual […]

Supreme Court: Despite FDA regulation of misbranded food, POM Wonderful may sue Coca-Cola under the Lanham Act for allegedly deceptive ads

Read this morning's Supreme Court 8-0 decision here. (Justice Breyer did not participate.) The first three paragraphs of Justice Kennedy's opinion sum things up nicely: POM Wonderful LLC makes and sells pomegranate juice products, including a pomegranate-blueberry juiceblend. App. 23a. One of POM’s competitors is the Coca-Cola Company. Coca-Cola’s Minute Maid Division makes a juice […]

Should People at GM Be Prosecuted for Homicide?

by Jeff Sovern That's the question raised by my letter in the Times.  Here's the relevant portion of the letter: Candice Anderson was charged with manslaughter and ultimately pleaded guilty to criminally negligent homicide for an accident leading to the death of her boyfriend. Now that G.M. has concluded that the accident was caused not by […]

Victory in Second Circuit for people with reading disabilities

Last summer, we told you about my office's amicus brief in the Second Circuit on behalf of 15 leading national disability rights organizations and academic researchers. The case is Authors Guild, Inc. v. Hathitrust, No. 12-4547, and the brief urged the court of appeals to uphold a district court ruling that the HathiTrust's effort to make […]