FTC’s report on 2023 activities re TILA, CLA, and EFTA

The Federal Trade Commission sent its annual report to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on the FTC’s 2023 enforcement and related activities on the Truth in Lending Act, Consumer Leasing Act, and Electronic Fund Transfer Act. The report highlights the FTC’s enforcement actions and initiatives under these laws and their implementing regulations, including in the […]

Tereszkiewicz article on auto warranty reimbursement and its effect on consumers

Piotr Tereszkiewicz of the Jagiellonian University in Krakow – Faculty of Law and Administration and KU Leuven – Faculty of Law has written Cruising Beyond Car Dealer Dominance, University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform, Forthcoming. Here’s the abstract: The automotive industry plays a pivotal role in both the American economy and daily life. This Article contends […]

Raba and Jimenez’s important study on what happens when debt defendants have to pay to file answers

Claire Johnson Raba of Illinois-Chicago and California-Irvine and Dalié Jiménez of California- Irvine and Harvard’s Center on the Legal Profession have written Pay to Plead: Finding Unfairness and Abusive Practices in California Debt Collection Cases. Here’s the abstract: In this Article, we report on one of the largest studies of debt collection lawsuits ever attempted. We […]

SCOTUS: “disputes are subject to arbitration if, and only if, the parties actually agreed to arbitrate those disputes.”

From today’s decision in Coinbase, Inc. v. Suski. Longtime readers will recall the empirical evidence that consumers do not understand arbitration clauses and so, in my view, they have not “actually agreed” to arbitration clauses.

For law professors: want to be on a list of consumer law profs for reporters to call?

I often get emails from reporters seeking comment on a consumer law matter. When I can, I answer their questions, but frequently they want someone who knows about an aspect of consumer law I don’t know that much about. In such cases, I refer them to someone else when I know of a better choice […]

NCLC’s Lauren Saunders on payday lenders’ vow to continue battling the CFPB rule: “It’s a sign of how fundamentally predatory your business model is, that after they’ve made unaffordable loans and put people into a debt trap, they can’t even comply with a rule that merely prevents them from continuing to hit people’s accounts.”

That quote appears in an article by Polo Rocha in the American Banker headlined After loss at Supreme Court, payday lenders vow to keep fighting CFPB (behind paywall but available on Lexis). As the article explains “The CFPB rule, which has never taken effect, would prohibit payday lenders from making another attempt after a payment fails […]

Report describes problems with credit-card rewards programs

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau analyzed several hundred consumer complaints relating to the administration of credit card rewards programs and identified four recurring themes that resulted in consumers not receiving the rewards they were promised: (1) unexpected promotional conditions, (2) devaluation, (3) redemption problems, and (4) revocation. The report is here.

9th Cir. grants en banc review to consider personal jurisdiction over online businesses

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals last week granted en banc review in a case called Briskin v. Shopify, to consider whether a state may exercise specific personal jurisdiction over a defendant that unlawfully uses its nationally accessible web platform to extract data from in-state consumers. As reporter Alison Frankel of Reuters wrote, “The court’s […]

For consumer law professors who haven’t already taken the Who Teaches Consumer Law survey

Regular readers of the blog will recall seeing a draft of my survey questions for consumer law professors. Attendees at the Teaching Consumer Law conference answered the final survey questions, but I would also love to receive responses from those who could not attend the conference and who have either taught consumer law or hope […]

Supreme Court upholds CFPB funding

The U.S. Supreme Court today, in a 7-2 decision, ruled in favor of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, rejecting a challenge brought by payday lenders to Congress’s decision about how to fund the agency. The case came to the Court after the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals’ unprecedented ruling that funding for the Bureau’s violates […]