Law Commons^™

Bankruptcy Abuse: An Empirical Study Of Consumer Exemptions Cases, Bernard Trujillo

ExpressO

On April 20, 2005, the President of the United States signed a sweeping legislative overhaul of the consumer bankruptcy system. The bankruptcy reform legislation is based on an empirical assertion: that sophisticated debtors with the means to re-pay their debts were instead filing for bankruptcy and acquiring a discharge, thereby abusing the bankruptcy system.

This Article presents the results of an empirical study of bankruptcy court doctrine in consumer exemptions proceedings over a twenty-year period. The findings suggest a serious empirical flaw in the premise of the bankruptcy reform legislation. The study shows that the bankruptcy system minimizes abuse by …

Better Than Cash? Global Proliferation Of Debit And Prepaid Cards And Consumer Protection Policy, Arnold S. Rosenberg

ExpressO

A global deluge of debit cards and prepaid cards – payment cards that do not require consumers to qualify for credit – is rapidly making electronic payment systems accessible to much of the world’s population that previously paid in cash for goods and services. The global proliferation of payment cards is fraught with both risk and promise for consumers.

The billions of people of low to moderate incomes who are being hurled from a cash economy into the era of electronic payments in emerging economies by the proliferation of debit and prepaid cards are particularly vulnerable to abuses by banks …

Breaking The Bank: Revisiting Central Bank Of Denver After Enron And Sarbanes-Oxley, Celia Taylor

ExpressO

No abstract provided.

Finding The Contract In Contracts For Law, Forum, And Arbitration, William John Woodward

ExpressO

Contract provisions specifying the law or forum (either judicial or arbitration) have begun appearing in litigated cases, as businesses have pressed many courts for their enforcement against consumers. In at least some of the cases, enforcement of a choice of law provision results in the displacement of the consumer’s home state protection by the lesser consumer protection of the State of the form drafter’s choosing. This phenomenon raises serious problems of federalism and local control of consumer protection. But while considerable scholarly attention has been lavished on so-called “mandatory arbitration” in this context, much less has attempted to improve our …

Global Credit Card Use And Debt: Policy Issues And Regulatory Responses, Ronald J. Mann

ExpressO

The rise of card-based payments has transformed the landscape of payments in the last half century, from one dominated by government-supported paper-based payments to one dominated by wholly private systems. The rise of those payments presents a number of policy problems, the most serious of which is the empirically demonstrable likelihood that use of the cards contributes to an undue level of consumer credit and that borrowing on the cards contributes to a rise in the level of consumer bankruptcy. Although the existing pattern shows great variation from country to country, regulators should take no solace in those variations. Building …