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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

Marotta-Wurlgler Asks if Disclosure Matters

Posted on December 02, 2010
Florencia Marotta-Wurgler of NYU has written Does Disclosure Matter? Here's the abstract: Disclosure has long been the preferred regulatory approach to curtail one-sided standard form contract terms. Examples include the Truth in Lending Act, the new "ALI Principles of the...

Indiana closes debtors' prison

Posted on December 01, 2010
A while back I reported on the revival of debtor's prison in a southern Indiana county court. The Indiana Court of Appeals has now struck down the local county court rule that imposed contempt sanctions, including imprisonment, for debtors who...

Highlights from Mobile Payments: Global Markets, Empowered Consumers and New Rules

Posted on December 01, 2010
by Colin Hector & Liz Eraker Last month,the University of Washington, School of Law and the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at U.C. Berkeley Law School convened representatives from regulatory, academic, industry, and public interest communities for a...

Continuing issues of redactions of the judicial records in the Rosetta Stone trademark appeal

Posted on November 30, 2010
by Paul Alan Levy Last month, I discussed the appellate brief filed by Rosetta Stone in its appeal from a trial court?s dismissal of its trademark lawsuit over Google?s practice of allowing advertisers to pay for ads directed to Google...

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CL&P Roundup

Posted on November 29, 2010
by Deepak Gupta Arbitration and Class Actions: On Saturday, The New York Times ran an editorial entitled "The Arbitration War," supporting consumers and state law in AT&T v. Concepcion. The Wall Street Journal's ed board, allowing its antipathy to class...

Kiplinger: Elizabeth Warren Explains What We Can Expect from the New Consumer Agency

Posted on November 28, 2010
Here. Sounds like the initial focus is on making disclosures for credit cards and mortgages readable so that consumers can compare them. That is a worthwhile goal, but some of us are skeptical about how much disclosures can accomplish. Perhaps...

Paper on Capping the Costs of Consumer Arbitration

Posted on November 27, 2010
Michelle Eviston and Richard A. Bales, the latter of Northern Kentucky University - Salmon P. Chase College of Law, have written Capping the Costs of Consumer and Employment Arbitration, forthcoming in the University of Toledo Law Review. Here's the abstract:...

Come "Hell or High Water"

Posted on November 27, 2010
Back in the day, scammers would rely on the holder-in due-course doctrine to enforce promissory notes against consumers who purchased worthless or defective goods. Today, it is the ?hell or high water? lease of Article 2. Preying mostly on small...

Consumer Groups File FTC Complaint To Curb Unfair and Deceptive Online Health Care Marketing

Posted on November 23, 2010
Today, the Center for Digital Democracy, U.S. PIRG, Consumer Watchdog, and World Privacy Forum filed this 144-page complaint demanding that the Federal Trade Commission investigate unfair and deceptive advertising practices faced by consumers when they seek health information and services...

WSJ Report: How Republicans Plan to Attack the CFPB

Posted on November 23, 2010
Here. The article reports that two Members of Congress have "sent letters to the inspectors general of both the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve, directing them to conduct an investigation into the work being done to establish the new...

Federal Prosecutors on Verge of Announcing Major Insider Trading Indictments

Posted on November 21, 2010
Apparently, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan, working with the FBI, will soon be announcing criminal charges in a major insider trader case that will target Wall Street traders and executives.

Is the foreclosure crisis slowly beginning to end?

Posted on November 19, 2010
According to this article in today's New York Times: Even as the fight over foreclosures continues, the high tide of delinquency among homeowners has begun to recede. Households that are behind in their mortgage payments fell during the third quarter...

DOJ's Access to Justice Initiative Announces New Programs

Posted on November 19, 2010
The head of the Department of Justice's Access to Justice Initiative, Harvard law prof Laurence Tribe, announced three new programs today: (1) a toll-free number that will connect overtime and minimum wage claimants to an American Bar Association-sponsored lawyer referral...

New Yorker Article on Debt Collector

Posted on November 19, 2010
The October 11 issue of the New Yorker has a piece titled Letter from Buffalo: Pay Up by Jake Halpern that presents an interesting profile of a Buffalo debt collector. The debt collector is struggling to make enough money to...

FDA, FTC, and Treasury Go After Caffeinated Alcoholic Drinks Aimed at Young People

Posted on November 18, 2010
As the Washington Post explains today: Federal agencies moved aggressively Wednesday to eliminate from the market the potent alcoholic "energy" drinks spiked with caffeine that have become wildly popular on college campuses in recent years. In letters to four companies,...

Gannett Shamed Into Changing Policy on Responding to Requests to Identify Blog Commenters

Posted on November 17, 2010
An interesting AP article has appeared about a controversy in Wisconsin -- after several nasty comments appeared on the website of a Wausau newspaper about a local public official, the official asked the paper who was writing the nasty comments,...

Responding to prosecutors seeking to identify anonymous bloggers ? Google and other ISP?s could learn from the mainstream media

Posted on November 17, 2010
by Paul Alan Levy There have been several stories recently covering the resolution of a lawsuit by Tom Rich, a formerly anonymous blogger, against the City of Jacksonville and a pair of prosecutors who went along with Robert Hinson, a...

Dow Jones settles its hot news claims against Briefing.com -- and gets only words

Posted on November 17, 2010
by Paul Alan Levy The blogosphere has been reverbrating today with news of the settlement of Dow Jones? lawsuit against Briefing.com, which features an admission by the defendant of liability for copyright infringement and DMCA violations, as well as ?common...

Dodd-Frank Conference Online

Posted on November 15, 2010
Last month the Center for Consumer Law at the University of Houston Law Center held a half-day conference on the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. This Conference provided an over-view of Dodd-Frank, and explained how its provisions...

Investing in Litigation

Posted on November 15, 2010
It's well known that class actions and other aggregated litigation require many lawyers, paralegals, and experts to make them go. And so, the well-heeled, repeat-player lawyers finance the litigation for everyone else. As a result, their paydays may be larger...

Fed Governor Gets It Right - Mortgage Servicing is Broken

Posted on November 14, 2010
The newest Federal Reserve Governor and former state banking regulator, Sarah Bloom Raskin, spoke at this week's National Consumer Law Center conference in Boston about systemic problems in mortgage servicing. Unlike other bank regulators, she does not attempt to minimize...

Another Academic Attack On Disclosure

Posted on November 14, 2010
Omri Ben-Shahar of University of Chicago and Carl E. Schneider of Michigan have written The Failure of Mandated Disclosure. Here's the abstract: This article explores the spectacular prevalence, and failure, of the single most common technique for protecting personal autonomy...

The Politics (or Not) of the Bipartisan Deficit Reduction Commission

Posted on November 13, 2010
Former Senator Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, co-chairs of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, last week made known their preliminary views on how to deal with the national deficit through budget cuts and tax changes. The whole...

Times Coverage of AT&T Mobility Oral Argument

Posted on November 10, 2010
Here.

Post-Argument Coverage of AT&T v. Concepcion

Posted on November 10, 2010
by Deepak Gupta Because I don't have a crystal ball, I'll leave to others the task of making predictions based on yesterday's oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court in AT&T v. Concepcion. (By the way, here's some of the...

Property Outlaws

Posted on November 09, 2010
In fine American property tradition, squatters are taking matters into their own hands to respond to the huge inventory of foreclosed, bank-owned homes. Hernando de Soto reminds us that the origins of many U.S. property titles derived from squatters, and...

Would You Take Out A Mortgage To Pay The Lawyer Who Got You Out of Foreclosure?

Posted on November 08, 2010
You are in foreclosure. You have no money to pay a lawyer to get you out of foreclosure and keep you in your house. So, you agree that, if the lawyer succeeds in keeping you in your house, you will...

Pre-argument commentary on AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion

Posted on November 08, 2010
by Deepak Gupta Here's a roundup of some of the latest commentary on the the Concepcion case, which I'll be arguing tomorrow before the U.S. Supreme Court: Brian Fitzpatrick, Supreme Court case could end class-action suits, San Francisco Chronicle David...

Hoofnagle Paper on Identity Theft

Posted on November 05, 2010
Chris Jay Hoofnagle University of California, Berkeley has written Internalizing Identity Theft, UCLA Journal of Law and Technology (2010). Here's the abstract: Why has identity theft remained so prevalent, in light of the development of ever more sophisticated fraud detection...

San Francisco Bans Happy Meals

Posted on November 03, 2010
Read about it in this LA Times article. Here's an excerpt: San Francisco's board of supervisors has voted, by a veto-proof margin, to ban most of McDonald's Happy Meals as they are now served in the restaurants.The measure will make...

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