If you missed the Senate hearing held in mid-December by Sen. Al Franken on the Arbitration Fairness Act, view it here or by clicking on the embedded video below. Go to approximately 1:54:30 (1 hour, 54 minutes, and 30 seconds) to watch a powerful exchange between Franken and one of pro-arbitration witnesses.
That is the name of this article by Kate Cox over at the Consumerist. Among the items Cox discusses is the Student Loan Borrowers' Bill of Rights and the Arbitration Fairness Act, which generally would negate pre-dispute agreements that require arbitration of employment, consumer, civil rights, or antitrust disputes. Cox notes that the Act now […]
Here. An excerpt: [W]hile there has been attention to aggressive student debt collectors hired by the federal government, the [Educational Credit Management Corporation] does something else: it brings legal challenges to those few who are desperate enough to seek bankruptcy relief. * * * Founded in 1994, just after the largest agency backstopping federal student […]
As part of what the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau terms its "continu[ing] efforts to make mortgages safer and with fewer surprises along the way," the agency today issued a request for information from the public about how to improve the mortgage closing process. Here's the agency's summary: This notice requests information from the public about […]
In September, a group of auto safety advocates and parents represented by Public Citizen sued the Department of Transportation over its failure to issue a congressionally-mandated regulation to address the problem of backover crashes, that is, collisions in which a vehicle moving backwards strikes a person (or object) behind the vehicle. Each year on average, […]
by Paul Alan Levy A decision yesterday by a panel of the Michigan Court of Appeals shows that First Amendment protections, and particularly protection for online anonymity, is alive and well in Michigan. Ruling in Ghanam v. Doe, the Court held that when discovery is sought to identify anonymous defendants so that they can be […]
by Paul Alan Levy In the wake of recent coverage of an attempt by the online trinket company Kleargear.com to ruin the credit of a customer whose wife complained about Kleargear’s failure to send an order of Christmas gifts, in violation of a non-disparagement clause inserted into later versions of the online sales contract, […]
We had previously posted a link to a site from which you could purchase SMU professor Mary Spector's article, Where the FCRA Meets the FDCPA: The Impact of Unfair Collection Practices on the Credit Report, 20 Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law Policy (2013). Now it's available for free on SSRN. Here is the abstract: This […]
by Jeff Sovern From time to time we blog about credit reporting issues. But it is worth noting that when it operates properly, the credit reporting system is a huge boon to lenders and consumers, because it enables lenders to determine which consumers are most likely to repay a loan, which in turn enables lenders […]
As we've explained in a series of posts, in Carrera v. Bayer, the Third Circuit reversed a grant of class certification on the ground that the class wasn't "ascertainable." Among other things, the panel said that the class of purchasers of an over-the-counter weight-loss product had not shown that it would be able to screen out […]