More “Reform” from John Beisner and the Chamber

In connection with its "Legal Reform Summit" last week, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Institute for Legal Reform issued a new paper written by John Beisner and his colleagues at Skadden Arps with new proposals for legislation to limit class actions and expand federal jurisdiction over both class actions and individual actions. Entitled A Roadmap for […]

The ACT and the College Board sued over alleged unlawful sale of test-takers’ private information

As Emily Babay of philly.com explains The companies that administer the SAT and ACT college entrance exams are being sued over their sales of students' personal information to outside parties. A lawsuit filed this week contends that the College Board, which  runs the SAT, and ACT, Inc., sell identifying information about the hundreds of thousands […]

Report: cash-for-clunkers (CARS) program not terribly efficient

by Brian Wolfman Remember the Obama Administration's early "stimulus" program known as cash-for-clunkers? The Consumer Assistance to Recycle and Save Act of 2009, or CARS, was meant to encourage people to trade in their gas guzzlers and buy new fuel-efficient cars. You traded in the gas guzzler, and the federal government funded a $3,500 to […]

Paper on Critical Race Theory and Crtical Race Feminism and the Unbanked

Emily Houh and Kristin Kalsem, both of Cincinnati, have written It's Critical: Legal Participatory Action Research, forthcoming in 18 Michigan Journal of Race & Law. Here's the abstract: The ongoing community-based research project that we describe in this article will contribute, we hope, to an understanding of the fringe economy by offering insights into what […]

Victims or fraudsters?: Telling them apart in the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis

That's the name of this post published by Daniel Colbert in the American Criminal Law Review. Colbert's piece examines United States v. Phillips, a recent en banc decision from the Seventh Circuit that deals with the intersection of criminal law and mortgage fraud. Here's the piece:   By Daniel Colbert, ACLR Featured Blogger                     […]

Jon Stewart on the JP Morgan mortgage securities fraud settlement

Last week, we posted about JP Morgan's tentative agreement with the federal government to pay $13 billion to settle claims that it knowingly sold faulty mortgage securities that contributed to the financial crisis. The Wall Street Journal's editorial page and other members of the conservative press responded to the agreement by calling it a shakedown by […]

Is it worse to be called “the Government” than “the State of Tennessee?

by Paul Alan Levy In this motion a prosecutor asked a trial judge to order a particular defense lawyer to stop referring to her during jury trials as “the Government” on the ground that jurors would likely take this as a derogatory reference “and is meant to make the State’s attorneys seem oppressive and to […]

“Company Doe” case before Fourth Circuit tomorrow; crucial consumer and First Amendment implications

We've blogged before about the "Company Doe" case, in which a company sued to block the inclusion of a product report in the Consumer Product Safety Commission's publicly available, web-accessible database about potentially dangerous products. The district court permitted the company to litigate in secret and under the pseudonym "Company Doe," and a coalition of […]

Jeffrey Joseph Op-Ed: Consumer Protection Bureau Bad for Business

by Jeff Sovern In the Detroit News. Professor Joseph refers to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as "purposefully-misnamed," as if members of Congress sat around saying "let's create an agency that will hurt consumers but give it a name that suggests it will protect them." So what does he think is wrong with the Bureau? […]