My colleagues Greg Beck and Brian Wolfman have blogged here several times about the fight over the FDA's graphic cigarette warnings, which were invalidated by the D.C. Circuit on First Amendment grounds. Other countries, however, are continuing to require graphic warnings. And now from Australia comes the fascinating news that the new graphic warnings there […]
The Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation remains under assault in the Republican controlled House of Representatives. At a hearing yesterday before the House Financial Services Committee's subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, law professor Thomas Merrill and lawyer C. Boyden Gray testified that certain aspects of Dodd-Frank are likely unconstitutional. Merrill's testimony is here and Gray's testimony […]
The case was brought by our own U.S. Department of Justice. Read about it here.
Linda Fisher of Seton Hall has written Shadowed by the Shadow Inventory: A Newark, New Jersey Case Study of Stalled Foreclosures & Their Consequences, forthcoming in the UC Irvine Law Review. Here's the abstract: Foreclosure activity has declined recently in some areas, but a number of states, such as Florida, New Jersey, and Illinois, showed […]
Suddenly, there's a lot going on the in the world of debt collection regulation. On the heels of yesterday's announcement by the FTC of a huge debt-collection settlement (discussed in the post below), the CFPB is announcing today that it will use its UDAAP authority to regulate the collection practices of banks. “It doesn’t matter […]
The FTC announced yesterday that the "world’s largest debt collection operation, Expert Global Solutions and its subsidiaries, has agreed to stop harassing consumers with allegedly illegal debt collection calls and to pay a $3.2 million civil penalty – the largest ever obtained by the Federal Trade Commission against a third-party debt collector." The FTC's press […]
That's the topic of a Times article, Democrats Plan Challenge to G.O.P.’s Filibuster Use. The plan seems to be to leave unchanged the filibuster rules for legislation and confirmation of judges, but limit use of the filibuster for votes on confirmation of agency appointees. Such a change would make it easier to vote on confirmation […]
Law profs Sam Issacharoff and D. Theodore Rave "The BP Oil Spill Settlement and the Paradox of Public Litigation." Here is the abstract: The streamlined administrative program that BP set up to pay claims arising out of the Deepwater Horizon Oil spill — the Gulf Coast Claims Facility (GCCF) — promised a significant transaction-cost savings […]
That's the topic of this article by Alana Semuels of the LA Times.
David Ray Papke of Marquette has written Perpetuating Poverty: Exploitative Businesses, the Urban Poor, and the Failure of Liberal Reform. Here's the abstract: This article scrutinizes the rent-to-own, payday lending, and title pawn businesses – all of which target and exploit the urban poor. Each type of business has developed a sophisticated business model that […]