When the Supreme Court upheld Obamacare's individual mandate last year in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, it was not a total victory for reform: because the Court held that the Act's Medicaid expansion imposed too coercive a spending condition on states, states were left with a choice whether or not to accept federal […]
By Paul Bland, On Twitter @PblandBland This is a case with very painful facts – according to the complaint, a Kaiser patient went in to see his doctor and was told he had a particular type of cancer that his doctor wasn’t familiar with, but would do “internet research” about, that he might die within […]
That's the question addressed by law professor Linda Simard in her article A View from Within the Fortune 500: An Empirical Study of Negative Value Class Actions and Deterrence. Here is the abstract: This paper takes a look inside the Fortune 500 to analyze the deterrent effect of negative value class actions. The study focuses […]
Robert C. Hockett of Cornell has written Post-Bubble Foreclosure-Prevention and -Mitigation Options in Seattle. Here's the abstract: This paper, commissioned by the Seattle City Council, takes the measure of Seattle's post-bubble negative equity and foreclosure problems, estimates numbers of underwater loans that have benefitted by existing federal, state and local programs, and recommends several options […]
The Report is here. From the press release: Total cost of credit declined: The CFPB found that the total cost of credit declined by two percentage points between 2008 and 2012. The total cost of credit includes all fees, interest, and finance charges paid by the consumer to the card issuer. The decline in the […]
Katherine J. Strandburg of NYU has written Free Fall: the Online Market's Consumer Preference Disconnect, University of Chicago Law Forum (2013). Here's the abstract: Do Internet users “pay” for online products and services with personal data? The common analogy between online data collection for behaviorally targeted advertising and payment for purchases is seriously misleading. There […]
Guest post by Daniel Colbert (2L, Georgetown Law) How does the shutdown affect consumers? The short answer is that the shutdown likely won’t hurt consumers as much as it will hurt government employees, Head Start students, and panda-cam enthusiasts, but, still, it will put a significant damper on the government’s ability to protect consumers. Here […]
by Paul Alan Levy One of the worst things that can happen to libel plaintiffs is to lose the suit in a way that confirms the veracity of the charges made publicly against it. This is what recently happened to Thomas Cooley law School. Past articles here have discussed its efforts to identify a former […]
I found this NYT commentary from this past weekend interesting: looking at a few recent cases pitting government regulators or homeowners against major banks, the article observes, "District court judges are not generally known as flamethrowers, but some seem to be losing patience with the banks."
by Deepak Gupta Legal reporter Alison Frankel of Reuters has a new column highlighting the effort to seek full-court rehearing of the Third Circuit's troubling decision in Carrera v. Bayer, which holds that plaintiffs must show, before they can certify a class, how they will identify and prove the class membership of consumers who purchased the defendant's product. […]