by Jeff Sovern I have a suggestion for the CFPB relating to arbitration. Many readers will know this background, but for those who don't: in 2010, Congress enacted the Dodd-Frank Act, which in section 1028 directed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to study arbitration. The statute also authorized the Bureau to regulate consumer financial arbitration […]
Many of our readers are consumer lawyers. Many of them handle complex, aggregated litigation, so they may be interested in Collected Wisdom on Selecting Leaders and Managing MDLs by law professor Elizabeth Burch and U.S. district judge Stephen Bough. Here is the abstract: Today, nearly one out of every two new suits filed in federal […]
by Jeff Sovern Here. [Disclosure: the website is put up by AAJ, which gave St. John's a grant to fund some of my research back in 2015]
by Jeff Sovern Blankenstein's essay appears in the National Review. Bureau-watchers may recall that Blankenstein served as an associate director at the Bureau during the Trump administration but left after a rebellion over blog posts he had written a decade earlier questioning whether use of the n-word is racist, among other things. Here's the opening […]
That's the title of this article by LA Times consumer reporter David Lazarus, who explains that "Rohit Chopra is expected to receive the U.S. Senate’s blessing any day now to become the new head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. His job will be to restore credibility to a watchdog agency that was largely sidelined during […]
by Paul Alan Levy When Keep Pushing, a St. Louis community organization devoted to protecting the unhoused, went door-to-door to speak to tenants facing eviction orders and hand out a flyer about their rights under the CDC eviction moratorium, one of the landlords whose tenants were visited, Norwood 2020, was desperate to suppress this potential threat […]
Here. This really brings home how mortgage debt compares to other consumer debts.
The Washington Post reports: The Biden administration continues to defend lawsuits against the Education Department over Trump-era policies on student loans and career training regulation. Biden’s Education Secretary Miguel Cardona has begun dismantling his predecessor’s policies. The department this week lifted a ban on colleges providing emergency grants to undocumented and international students. It has […]
The Federal Trade Commission was busy yesterday. Operators of Student Loan Debt Relief Scheme Banned From Providing Debt Relief Services as Part of Settlement with FTC (May 17, 2021) FTC Announces Latest Enforcement Action Halting Deceptive CBD Product Marketing (May 17, 2021) FTC Data Shows Huge Spike in Cryptocurrency Investment Scams (May 17, 2021)
Andrew Gilden of Willamette has written Endorsing After Death, 63 William & Mary Law Review (2022).Here's the abstract: An endorsement is an act of giving one’s public support to a person, product, service, or cause; accordingly, it might seem impossible for someone to make an endorsement after they have died. Nevertheless, posthumous endorsements have become […]

