by Jeff Sovern Those who use our casebook may recall the note about R.J. Reynolds advertising that its Winston cigarettes don't have additives. In the new edition, it's at pages 92-93. The casebook reports that Winston's sales increased by 9% as a a result of the ads, and that the FTC brought a case against Reynolds […]
Policy solutions to help consumers whose credit histories were negatively effected by the Great Recession and the foreclosure crisis.
As Gerard Magliocca noted in October, he and I are the only commentators who’ve taken the position that the courts ought to defer to the Senate’s view of its own recess in NLRB v. Noel Canning. Given that, I was pleased that the notion of deferring to the Senate received so much attention at oral argument yesterday. I […]
Definitely read this op-ed in the L.A. Times by Nan Aron, president of the Alliance for Justice. Perfectly encapsulates the myriad problems with forced arbitration, and includes this pithy metaphor: Imagine the Dodgers have just won the pennant and are going to play the Yankees in the World Series. But the rules have changed: All games […]
Says the Supreme Court this morning. No surprise there. Here's the first paragraph of Justice Sotomayor's unanimous opinion: Under the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005 (CAFA or Act), defendants in civil suits may remove “mass actions” from state to federal court. CAFA defines a “mass action” as “any civil action . . . in […]
In May, we told you about a privacy case against Facebook that was settled without much benefit to the class. The case involved Facebook’s practice (called “Sponsored Stories”) of featuring the names and images of its users in advertising without the users’ consent. As alleged in the complaint, when a user interacts with a company […]
We've written before about Facebook's "Sponsored Stories" program that repackages its users' interactions with companies as ads for those companies. (Public Citizen objected when the case was settled without much benefit to the class.) Now Facebook is apparently retiring the "Sponsored Stories" name but not the general idea. According to Facebook's blog post last week, […]
Fifteen years ago, the Department of Justice sued the major cigarette companies, alleging that the companies conspired to mislead consumers about the risks of tobacco products. The US District Court for the District of Columbia ruled for DOJ, and the ruling was upheld on appeal. Among other things, to remedy the companies’ misleading statements, the […]
The federal government's faulty Affordable Care Act (ACA) website — and similar problems on some state-run ACA websites — may not be the biggest problem facing the ACA's implementation. As this article by Jonathan Easley explains, a new survey conducted by Enroll America, "a nonprofit with close ties to the Obama administration that is aiming […]
On his blog at U.S. PIRG, Ed Mierzwinski expounds on the Target data breach in a post entitled Target says "Oops, 70-110 million consumers hacked." He points out that 70 to 100 million, "not the original 40 million customers, had their credit or debit card numbers hacked in December (or possibly at other times). Even […]