by Jeff Sovern I've moved on to the privacy chapter of our casebook, and in that regard I just finished reading M. Ryan Calo's (Calo is at the University of Washington and affilated with Stanford) intriguing Against Notice Skepticism In Privacy (And Elsewhere), 87 Notre Dame Law Review 1027 (2012). Before I add my two […]
In this piece, Bruce Bartlett has the audacity to bring facts to the discussion of the so-called budget crisis. It's mainly about how "entitlements" are a small part of the problem despite what we hear from the Republicans. Here's an excerpt about social security, where he explains that if we simply subjected the same percentage […]
This week, the Ninth Circuit agreed to rehear en banc a case about a cop who revealed the abuse of suspects inside his department. The Ninth Circuit has developed a troubling line of cases to the effect that, under the Supreme Court's 2006 decision in Garcetti v. Ceballos, any time a police officer in the […]
by Paul Alan Levy Amid the coverage of the feminist prank web site using Victoria Secret's name on a site promoting the concept of consent-themed underwear instead of underwear that portrays a woman’s readiness for sexual contact as a “sure thing,” I noted that in demanding the takedown of the web site on trademark infringement […]
An 11-judge en banc panel of the Ninth Circuit heard oral argument this week in Kilgore v. Keybank, an important consumer arbitration case. Kilgore presents the question whether the Federal Arbitration Act and the Supreme Court's decision in AT&T v. Concepcion require courts to enforce arbitration clauses even when they would block consumers from pursuing […]
Richard Frankel of Drexel has written The Arbitration Clause as Super Contract. Here's the abstract: It is widely acknowledged that the purpose of the Federal Arbitration Act was to place arbitration clauses on “equal footing” with other contracts. Nonetheless,federal and state courts have placed arbitration clauses on a pedestal by creating special interpretive rules for […]
Read about it here in a piece by William Alden. We discussed the possibility right after her election. Now it looks like a certainty. An excerpt from Alden's piece: Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard professor who won a Senate seat in November, is officially on track to join the Senate Banking Committee, after the Democratic Steering […]
by Brian Wolfman We have now posted twice (here and here) about the Second Circuit's Caronia decision, in which the court ditched the misdemeanor conviction of a drug company prescription drug representative, saying that his promotion of one of the company's products was protected by the First Amendment. I've posted about the case because it […]
by Jeff Sovern Here. The idea is that a company can apply to the Bureau for permission to try different disclosures and the disclosures can then be evaluated, and perhaps adopted. In its statement announcing the proposal, the Bureau says: When deciding whether or not to grant a company a waiver from current disclosure requirements, the […]
by Jeff Sovern Here. Two points from the Executive Summary, though there's quite a bit more than this: The NCRAs have created an automated system for handling consumer disputes and forwarding them to data furnishers. Through this automated system – called e-OSCAR – the NCRAs provide furnishers with one or two numeric codes indicating the […]