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Consumer Law

CL&P Blog

The contributors to this blog are a diverse group of lawyers and law professors who practice, teach, or write about consumer law and policy. Although the blog is hosted by Public Citizen's Consumer Justice Project, the views expressed here are solely those of the individual contributors and do not necessarily reflect those of the institutions with which they are affiliated.

Post Frequency: 15.1/day

Last Entry: April 01, 2011 at 11:13:04

Rate Freeze Mods - Not so much

Posted on October 31, 2008
By Alan White Looking at the October mortgage modifications (actually 9/25 to 10/25) I noticed that 40% of them were adjustable rate loans with reset dates in the next six months (November to April). Thinking these might be rate freezes,...

FDA Preemption Policy Driven By Politics, Not Science

Posted on October 30, 2008
Rep. Henry Waxman's Oversight and Government Reform Committee, using internal FDA documents, issued a devastating report yesterday demonstrating that the FDA was driven by political considerations, not science, in seeking preemption of state-law personal-injury claims involving defective and inadequately labeled...

Research on the Cognitive Deficits of Low-Income Low-Literacy Consumers

Posted on October 29, 2008
On October 20. the Wall Street Journal published "Emerging Lessons: For multinational companies, understanding the needs of poorer consumers can be profitable and socially responsible." In addition to discussing consumers in foreign countries, the piece notes that 14% of US...

Latest Foreclosure Numbers

Posted on October 29, 2008
By Alan White New foreclosure filings declined a bit from about 200,000 in July to about 180,000 for September, according to HOPE NOW's latest data. Completed foreclosure sales likewise leveled off at around 90,000 monthly. While HOPE NOW reports a...

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FDIC's Foreclosure Prevention

Posted on October 23, 2008
The FDIC, as conservator for IndyMac, has suspended all foreclosures and is aiming to modify 40,000 out of 60,000 currently delinquent IndyMac mortgages. In the six weeks since the takeover FDIC has mailed out 15,000 loan modification proposals, and has...

Another Call for Reform of the Copyright Code to Prevent Censorship

Posted on October 21, 2008
by Paul Alan Levy In an op-ed published today, Larry Lessig calls for reform of the Copyright Code to prevent the sort of political censorship that I discussed a few days ago here. Lessig suggests not only reform of the...

Who Are the Subprime Borrowers and How Many of Them Would Have Been Better Off If No One Had Lent to Subprime Borrowers?

Posted on October 20, 2008
Reports on the subprime crisis appear to divide subprime borrowers into three groups. You hear anecdotes about how borrowers fit into one group or the other, but it's not clear how many people belong to each group, or the extent...

Fannie and Freddie by the Numbers

Posted on October 19, 2008
By Alan White I?m coming back to a theme here, but the myth that Fannie and Freddie caused the crisis keeps being repeated. The subprime crisis was in no way caused by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, nor by Congressional...

How Does the Current Credit Crisis Parallel the Situation in the 1930's?

Posted on October 18, 2008
Over at Credit Slips, Adam Levitin talks about "some curious parallels with the 1930's."

Prof. Larry Lessig Releases New Book on the Internet Called "Remix"

Posted on October 18, 2008
Stanford law prof and Internet philosopher Larry Lessig has released his latest book on the Internet and the folly and danger of using 20th century constructs such as copyright to regulate it. Lessig's website on the book says this:For more...

CPSC and NHTSA Recalls for September 2008

Posted on October 18, 2008
Here are the September 2008 product recalls for the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Presidential Campaigns Use Keyword Advertising in Ways that IP Owners Seek to Quash

Posted on October 16, 2008
by Paul Alan Levy I have previously discussed the importance of keyword advertising as a source of exposure for comparative and critical advertising about corporations and their products, and warned about the efforts of the IP ownership bar to suppress...

Abusive Copyright Takedowns Aimed at McCain and Obama Show the Need to Amend the DMCA

Posted on October 16, 2008
by Paul Alan Levy In the last couple of weeks, both the Obama campaign and the McCain campaign have experienced the sort of abusive use of the intellectual property laws that Greg Beck and I have previously discussed here ?...

Mortgage restructuring and moral hazard

Posted on October 16, 2008
By Alan White Although moral hazard concerns for banks and securities investors went out the window with the various bailouts and government guarantee schemes, homeowners are not getting their debt written down, paid, insured or assumed by the Treasury...

Documents Detail Bush Preemption Strategy

Posted on October 15, 2008
by Deepak Gupta The American Association for Justice (AAJ) has just released a fascinating new report, based in part on documents they obtained through FOIA, detailing the Bush administration's use of preemption as a deregulatory strategy. In a stealth effort...

Why Consumer Reports Should Rate Law Schools (and Probably Other Graduate Schools Too)

Posted on October 14, 2008
Consumer Reports should rate law schools, and perhaps other schools too, for the following four reasons: First, the existing U.S. News rankings do not adequately measure law schools from the perspective of consumers, which in the case of law schools....

The Irrelevant Increase in the FDIC Insurance Cap

Posted on October 13, 2008
Adam Levitin over at Credit Slips has this nice post about the irrelevancy of raising the FDIC insurance on bank deposits from $100,000 to $250,000 as part of the bailout bill. Sure, 250K in insurance might help in the rare...

Amanda E. Quester and Kathleen E. Keest on Watters v. Wachovia

Posted on October 13, 2008
Amanda E. Quester of the Center for Responsible Lending and consumer advocate and writer Kathleen E. Keest have coauthored Looking Ahead after Watters v. Wachovia Bank: Challenges for the Lower Courts, Congress, and the Comptroller of the Currency, 27 Review...

Times Reports on Credit Card Suits, Modification of Mortgages, Evictions in Chicago and More

Posted on October 12, 2008
Yesterday's Times included "When Plastic Seduces, A Reckoning Awaits," about cases in the New York City Civil Court against consumers on credit cards. An excerpt:As the final stop on the subprime lending train, the Civil Court has become the 21st-century...

How Do We Know Consumers Don't Read Small Print?

Posted on October 10, 2008
Everybody "knows" consumers don't read fine print. But the empirical evidence I've found to support this claim is surprisingly sparse. Here's what I've come across: From my article, "Towards a New Model of Consumer Protection: The Problem of Inflated Transaction...

A Tale of Two UDRP's

Posted on October 08, 2008
by Paul Alan Levy I have recently had some involvement with two proceedings under the Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy ("UDRP"), a procedure for deciding trademark disputes about domain names. The International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers ("ICANN"), which controls...

The Fannie Freddie Fable

Posted on October 08, 2008
At last night's debate, Senator McCain trotted out the discredited fiction that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were the root cause of the foreclosure crisis, and that they started the practice of making reckless loans to homeowners who couldn't repay...

Aggressive Mortgage Mods Work

Posted on October 08, 2008
By Alan M. White A distressed homeowner?s chances of being offered a meaningful loan restructuring, as opposed to demands for increased payments to make up past defaults, depends a lot on which mortgage servicing company they happen to be dealing...

Times Reports on Postal Savings Banks and Countrywide Settlement

Posted on October 06, 2008
Today's Times has an interesting op-ed piece, "Mailing Our Way to Solvency," about the use of postal savings bank, which existed in this country until 1966 and still exist in some other countries. The author suggests that postal savings banks...

An Off-Topic Comment

Posted on October 06, 2008
While I generally confine my remarks on this Blog to consumer law issues, every once in a while I write about something which is at best tangentially related to consumer law. This is one of those comments. If that bothers...

Debt Collector Uses Consumer's Debit Card Information for Spending Spree

Posted on October 06, 2008
The Buffalo News reports here about a debt collector who persuaded a consumer to provide him with her debit card information and then ran up nearly $2,000 of charges on her account. He later asked the debt collection agency for...

Times Reports on Causes of Mortgage Crisis, FDA Problems, and More

Posted on October 05, 2008
Robert Frank has a terrific column in today's Times, "Pursuit of an Edge, In Steroids or Stocks," explaining why fund managers were willing to invest in subprime mortgage-backed securities. The entire piece is worth reading, but here are some excerpts:If...

A Bit More on Blaiming the CRA

Posted on October 03, 2008
A couple of weeks ago Alan had a thoughtful post here about the ridiculous claims that the subprime crisis was caused by the Community Reinvestment Act. I've been meaning to pile on. One of the arguments critics of the CRA...

Consumer Interests Annual Available

Posted on October 03, 2008
The Proceedings of the 54th Annual Conference of the American Council on Consumer Interests, also known as the Consumer Interests Annual, is now available here. Most of the contributors are consumer academics, though not of the law school variety; the...

New York Exempt Income Protection Act Enacted

Posted on October 03, 2008
On Friday, September 26, Governor Paterson signed into law New York's Exempt Income Protection Act. Some payments, such as certain Social Security benefits, are immune from seizure by debt collectors. But some debt collectors had found a way to get...

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