Should Non-Profit Groups That Engage in Electioneering Have to Fully Disclose Their Budgets and Their Donors?

The Supreme Court has in recent years famously struck down laws that barred corporate electioneering  on First Amendment grounds. But the Court has had little problem with laws that demand disclosure about who is contributing to elections and how much (though the Court protects anonymous speech in other contexts). With that in mind, read this L.A. […]

Instagram’s Binding Arbitration Clause Could Be the Worst Ever: It Seeks to Kill Off All Representative Actions

by Brian Wolfman Earlier this year, we told you (here, here, and here) about eBay's terrible new arbitration clause that bars its customers, both sellers and buyers, from participating in class actions against the company. The new clause came with a cynical twist: eBay allowed its customers to opt out of the clause within a […]

The Obama Judiciary

Consumer advocates generally believe that federal judges nominated by President Obama are more likely to decide cases favorably to consumers than are judges nominated by the President's recent Republican predecessors. So, how has the President fared with his nominations? Bob Barnes of the Washington Post has penned this article that discusses the President's judicial nominations. […]

Freer on Recent (and Future?) Supreme Court Class Action Cases

Richard D. Freer of Emory has written The Supreme Court and the Class Action: Where We Are and Where We Might Be Going.  Here's the abstract: In 2010 and 2011, the Supreme Court decided five class action cases. In 2012, it has agreed to hear four more. This piece summarizes what the Court has done […]

Another Concepcion Paper, This Time From Harvard

David Korn and David Rosenberg of Harvard have written Concepcion's Pro-Defendant Biasing of the Arbitration Process: The Class Counsel Solution.  Here's the abstract: By mandating that numerous plaintiffs litigate their common question claims separately in individual arbitrations rather than jointly in class action arbitrations, the Supreme Court in AT&T Mobility LLC v. Concepcion created a […]

New book about boilerplate contracts

Earlier this month, Professor Margaret Jane Radin put out a new book called Boilerplate: The Fine Print, Vanishing Rights, and the Rule of Law. Publisher Princetion University Press describes Professor's Radin's argument as follows: Margaret Jane Radin examines attempts to justify the use of boilerplate provisions by claiming either that recipients freely consent to them […]