“Law School Marketing and Legal Ethics”

That's the name of this article by Ben Trachtenberg of the University of Missouri Law School. Here is the abstract: Law schools have misled prospective students for years about the value of legal education. In some cases, law school officials have engaged in outright deceit, knowingly spreading false information about their schools. More commonly, they […]

A victory for consumer privacy — and our “junk” — at the airport

Most airline passengers today are likely to encounter one of two screening machines at the security checkpoints of major U.S. airports — the kind that shows a revealing image of the passenger's full body (the so-called "naked" scanners) or the kind that shows only a generic body outline or simply a box that says "OK." […]

Paper on the Foreclosure Crisis in Appalachia

Jenna Rosie Tighe of Appalachian State has written Responding to the Foreclosure Crisis in Appalachia: A Policy Review and Survey of Housing Counselors, 23 Housing Policy Debate No. 1 (2013). Here's the abstract: Existing research on the foreclosure crisis tends to focus on national trends or on metropolitan areas. Few studies focus on rural areas, […]

New FTC report on reverse-payment agreements between brand-name and generic drug companies

   For several years, the Federal Trade Commission has challenged under the antitrust laws so-called  “reverse-payment” or “pay-to-delay” settlements. In such a settlement, a brand-name drug company pays a generic-drug company not to sell a generic equivalent of a drug, thus allowing the brand-name to maintain an exclusive market at a high price for years […]

“The Irony of Privacy Class Action Litigation”

That's the title of a piece by Eric Goldman of Santa Clara Law School. Here's the abstract: In the past few years, publicized privacy violations have regularly spawned class action lawsuits in the United States, even when the company made a good faith mistake and no victim suffered any quantifiable harm. Privacy advocates often cheer […]

CFPB Issues New Rules for Mortgage Servicers

Mortgage servicers are the folks who collect your mortgage payments. Under new rules issued today by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, servicers will have to change their ways. Perhaps the most important change, as explained in this National Law Journal article, is "[a]t the first sign of trouble, when a homeowner has missed two consecutive […]

FTC: Food Health Claims Must Be Backed by Good Science

As explained in this article by Jenna Greene, "the Federal Trade Commission in a final decision issued January 16 will require juice maker POM Wonderful to conduct extensive clinical trials before it can make any claims about the health benefits of its products." And those clinical trials must produce "competent and and reliable scientific evidence" […]

More on Generic Drugs, Preemption, and Access to the Courts to Redress Drug-Related Injuries

We have posted several times recently (go here, here, and here) about Mutual Pharmaceutical Company v. Bartlett, a pending Supreme Court case that presents the question whether FDA approval of a generic prescription drug preempts a state-law damages claim premised on the drug's design defect. (The Supreme Court held 5-4 in PLIVA v. Mensing (2011) that FDA […]

Is enforcement of a security interest (e.g. a foreclosure) “debt collection” under the FDCPA?

Yes, says the Sixth Circuit, in Glazer v. Chase Home Finance, issued yesterday. This is good news for FDCPA plaintiffs, who have had to contend for years with a district court consensus that the enforcement of a security interest is not subject to most of the provisions of the Act. An odd type of split […]

Chamber of Commerce Doesn’t Want SEC to Require Public Companies to Disclose Their Campaign Contributions

Should public companies be forced to disclose to their shareholders — and thus to the world — their campaign contributions (rather than funnelling them secretively through third parties, such as the Chamber of Commerce)? The SEC is considering a disclosure rule, but the Chamber of Commerce is opposed, as explained in this article by Sue […]