In LaCrosse, Wisconsin, a disproportionately large percentage of the population have advance medical directives for dealing with end-of-life care, reports NPR's Planet Money. It's a cultural thing, not a government mandate: people there are just comfortable talking about and planning for their own deaths. LaCrosse is also notable for having the lowest health-care spending in […]
by Paul Alan Levy When I first read Judge Kozinski’s decision for a majority of a panel of the Ninth Circuit, holding that Cindy Lee Garcia, who has received death threats because her role in the movie Innocence of Muslims makes her appear to have cast serious aspersions on the prophet Mohammed, could assert her […]
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has released what it calls a "data point" on payday lendingAf. It's a small study based on data that the CFPB obtained from payday lenders in conjunction with the agency's supervisory authority over those lenders. The data indicate that many payday borrowers are habitual payday borrowers. After the jump are […]
As our friends at Public Justice explain, A lot of advocates for forced arbitration like to make a big deal out of how generally corporations pay most of the arbitration fees (that can be pretty expensive), rather than sticking those on the typical worker or consumer. . . . But the thing is, on those […]
by Brian Wolfman A couple weeks ago, in McMahon v. LVNV Funding (and a companion case), the Seventh Circuit held that debt collectors' letters to consumers offering to "settle" time-barred debts (that is, debts that would be subject to a successful statute-of-limitations defense) could mislead consumers and, thus, could violate the federal Fair Debt Collection […]
Kevin Davis has written this article reviewing legal issues raised by airbnb, the on-line apartment and home rental site that says it facilitates "[r]ent[als] from people in over 34,000 cities and 192 countries." Among the issues are (1) whether airbnb renters should have business licenses in cities and towns that require them generally, and (2) […]
Some contributors to this blog have expressed general skepticism about the value of disclosure as a means of consumer protection (and have argued that some types of disclosure are more likely to be effective than others). The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is interested in improving disclosures for prepaid cards. Here's how the CFPB describes the […]
by Brian Wolfman Tesla wants to sell its electric cars from its own stores directly to consumers. Some states require consumers to buy new cars from car dealers supposedly on the ground that requiring consumers to go through a dealer promotes competition. Really? Sounds like protectionism for car dealers, doesn't it? Tesla isn't saying that […]
Joshua Mitts of Sullivan & Cromwell has written How Effective is Mandatory Disclosure? Here's the abstract: Mandatory disclosure lies at the cornerstone of consumer protection law but its efficacy is unclear. I conduct one of the first online experiments on mandatory disclosure by evaluating a recent proposal to warn consumers of unexpected, unfavorable terms. To […]
That's one of the conclusions reached by Adam Levitin in his new essay The Politics of Financial Regulation and the Regulation of Financial Politics. Here is the abstract: This review essay considers six recent books on the financial crisis (Bernanke, Blinder, Bair, Barofsky, Connaughton, and Admati & Hellwig). The essay discerns two basic narratives of […]