Bad floods damage a lot of cars, and then some used car sellers want to sell those damaged cars to unsuspecting customers without disclosing the damage. This happened after Katrina (go, for instance, go here and here). Holly Petreaus, the head of Servicemember Affairs at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, has posted this warning about used […]
by Jeff Sovern Last week I had a very interesting conversation with a Ph.D candidate from the University of Amsterdam, Frederik J. Zuiderveen Borgesius, who is researching privacy regulation and behavioral targeting. He asked me if I could refer him to a book that explores when disclosure is an appropriate response to consumer protection problems […]
In addition to the exciting cert grants from the Supreme Court today in the gay marriage cases out of New York and California, don't overlook Oxford Health Plans v. Sutter, a case also taken today raising a question about the availability of class arbitration. The case is a followup to the decision in Stolt-Nielsen v. […]
by Brian Wolfman In a pay-for-delay settlement, a brand-name drug company pays a generic company that has challenged the brand-name company's patent to stay out of the market. Some early antitrust challenges to these settlements succeeded, but later court of appeals' rulings gave them a green light. Then, as we discussed in this post last July, […]
by Brian Wolfman The FDA says it violates federal law for a drug company sales rep to promote a prescription drug for an off-label use (that is, a use not approved by the FDA). So, a rep is convicted of a misdemeanor in federal district court for promoting a prescription drug for an off-label use. […]
Dee Pridgen of Wyoming has written Sea Changes in Consumer Financial Protection: Stronger Agency and Stronger Laws. I read this one before it was posted and found it particularly useful in pulling together some recent themes in consumer law and explaining how the Dodd-Frank Act's anti-predatory lending rules are based on behavioral economics, as opposed to […]
Many media outlets have reported on this week's D.C. Circuit hearing in a challenge to President Obama's three recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board. You'll recall that the President used his recess appointment power at the beginning of the year to make several appointments during pro forma Senate sessions that were specifically designed […]
by Paul Alan Levy I am dealing with a case in which a company has sued investors for defamation, alleging statements made about shenanigans of some of the individuals employed by the company. The "of and concerning" requirement under state law was federalized as a First Amendment requirement in New York Times v. Sullivan, but […]
Jan-Emmanuel De Neve of the London School of Economics and James Fowler of the University of California at San Diego Law School say yes in this article. Here's the abstract: Economists have long realized the importance of credit markets and borrowing behavior for household finance and economics more generally. More recently, twin studies have shown […]
This major article in today's Washington Post concerns what the author claims is a growing number of defamation lawsuits over online reviews on sites such as Yelp, Angie’s List and TripAdvisor and over Internet postings in general. They say the freewheeling and acerbic world of Web speech is colliding with the ever-growing importance of online […]