Shay Lavie of Harvard has written The Malleability of Collective Litigation, forthcoming in the Notre Dame Law Review. Here is the abstract: In Wal-Mart v. Dukes (131 S.Ct. 2541 [2011]), Wal-Mart avoided class action because employment decisions were made by local supervisors. However, it was Wal-Mart who chose to delegate discretion; by doing so, it […]
Spurred by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's recent ombudsman report on student loan debt (about which we posted), the New York Times has penned this editorial about the subject, focusing in part on private student loans (which amount to a mere $150 billion of the outstanding $1 trillion in student loan debt). The Times suggests […]
Yesterday, we posted about the government's fraud suit against Bank of America. Today's Washington Post has this coverage, which quotes a former regulator who says that the suit is not big enough to deter future fraudulent conduct and who ties deterrence to the threat of jail time for bank executives: “This is an act of […]
Today the United States filed a civil complaint for more than $1 billion against Bank of America, alleging that its component Countrywide engaged in a massive scheme to sell defective mortgage loans to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from 2007 to 2009. According to the lawsuit, "In order to increase the speed at which it […]
More information here. Abstracts are due December 7. (HT: Kathleen Engel)
Read about it in this National Law Journal article. Here's an excerpt: Big banks, little banks, credit card companies, student lenders – it seems like just about every player in the financial services industry has complained about the power of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Now it's the lawyers' turn. On October 24, the CFPB […]
Daniel A. Austin of Northeastern has written The Indentured Generation: Bankruptcy and Student Loan Debt, 53 Santa Clara Law Review (forthcoming) Here's the abstract: A generation of Americans has borrowed heavily for their education, and hundreds of thousands of them are deeply in debt. Some 37 million Americans owe a total of approximately $1 trillion […]
Pursuant to congressional mandate, since March 2011 the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) has maintained an electronic database of reports of harm associated with consumer products. This database serves a crucial function in helping alert consumers to dangerous products; before the database existed, as Public Citizen has reported, the CPSC took on average more than […]
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau yesterday added complaints about credit reporting to its on-line complaint system. That system also provides consumers the opportunity to register complaints about mortgages, credit cards, bank accounts, vehicle or other consumer loans, and student loans.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities answers that question in some detail. For an overview check out the chart below.