Fordham Law Conference to Include Consumer Law Panel

The conference is titled ""What is Urban Law Today?  A Symposium on the Field’s Past, Present, and Future in Honor of the Urban Law Journal’s 40th Anniversary.  It will be be held on February 28, 2013 at Fordham’s Lincoln Center Campus.  The consumer law panel, on consumer protection by local governments, is scheduled for 2:10pm-3:00pm. Speakers […]

More on the Republicans and the CFPB

So much is being written about Republican opposition to confirmation of the CFPB's director, Richard Cordray, that it's hard to keep up with it all.  But a couple of recent pieces pull a lot together and are worth a look. One is Nobel Laureate and Times columnist Paul Krugman's op-ed yesterday, Friends of Fraud, about […]

Senate bill would bar “pay-for-delay” deals between brand-name and generic drug companies

We have blogged several times (here, here, here, here, and here) about the Federal Trade Commission's challenges to "pay-to-delay" settlements between brand-name and generic drug companies, in which the brand-name company pays the generic to delay selling a generic equivalent of the brand-name drug. The Legal Times reports that the new chair of the Senate's […]

More Recess-Appointment Fallout: Republicans Introduce Bills to Freeze Work at the NLRB and the CFPB

As Todd Ruger explains in this National Law Journal article, "Senate Republicans are looking to stop work at the National Labor Relations Board and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, piggybacking on a federal appeals court ruling that invalidated some of President Barack Obama's controversial recess appointments."

Are PACER Fees Unlawfully High? Do They Undermine Some People’s Access to Federal Court Records?

by Brian Wolfman On January 25, 2013, Steve Schultze of Princeton University spoke about the fee-based system for access to federal court documents known as PACER. (PACER stands for Public Access to Court Electonic Records.)  At a Capitol Hill event sponsored by the Advisory Committee on Transparency, Schultze said that PACER charges far more than […]

Kent Barnett Paper on Separation of Powers Litigation

Kent H.Barnett of Georgia has written To the Victor Goes the Toil–Remedies for Regulated Parties in Separation-of-Powers Litigation, in which he mentions the Big Spring case over the validity of the president's recess appointments, including to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.  Here's the abstract: The U.S. Constitution imposes three key limits on the design of […]

Recess Appointments Challenge Reaches the Supreme Court; Justice Ginsburg Denies Emergency Application

by Deepak Gupta Earlier than many had expected, a challenge to President Obama's recess appointments reached the doorstep of the U.S. Supreme Court this morning, but it was quickly rebuffed this afternoon by Justice Ginsburg in her capacity as Circuit Justice for the Second Circuit. Justice Ginsburg did not request a response or refer the […]

“Dubious Doctrines: The Quasi-Class Action”

That's the name of a new piece by University of Texas law prof Linda Mullenix. Here's the abstract, with emphasis added to the last paragraph: In the past few years, the term “quasi-class action” has been appearing with increasing, uncritical frequency in a spate of federal court decisions. While it may be premature to characterize […]