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Consumer Protection Law Commons

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Series

2007

Discipline
Institution
Keyword
Publication

Articles 1 - 21 of 21

Full-Text Articles in Consumer Protection Law

Intel's Alleged Schemes Affected U.S. Consumers, Robert H. Lande Sep 2007

Intel's Alleged Schemes Affected U.S. Consumers, Robert H. Lande

All Faculty Scholarship

This short piece explains how the first unit discounts or rebates allegedly given by Intel on their X86 chips could harm competition, innovation, and PC purchasers in this crucial $33 billion/year market. For these reasons, their discounts or rebates could violate European Competition law and U.S. Antitrust law.


Brief Of Consumers Union Of United States, Inc., As Amicus Curiae In Support Of Petitioners, Riegel & Riegel V. Medtronic, Inc., No. 06-179 (U.S. Aug. 27, 2007), Lisa Heinzerling Aug 2007

Brief Of Consumers Union Of United States, Inc., As Amicus Curiae In Support Of Petitioners, Riegel & Riegel V. Medtronic, Inc., No. 06-179 (U.S. Aug. 27, 2007), Lisa Heinzerling

U.S. Supreme Court Briefs

No abstract provided.


Notification Of Data Security Breaches, Edward J. Janger, Paul M. Schwartz Mar 2007

Notification Of Data Security Breaches, Edward J. Janger, Paul M. Schwartz

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.


Some Peer-To-Peer, Democratically And Voluntarily Produced Thoughts About 'The Wealth Of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets And Freedom,' By Yochai Benkler, Ann Bartow Jan 2007

Some Peer-To-Peer, Democratically And Voluntarily Produced Thoughts About 'The Wealth Of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets And Freedom,' By Yochai Benkler, Ann Bartow

Law Faculty Scholarship

In this review essay, Bartow concludes that The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler is a book well worth reading, but that Benkler still has a bit more work to do before his Grand Unifying Theory of Life, The Internet, and Everything is satisfactorily complete. It isn't enough to concede that the Internet won't benefit everyone. He needs to more thoroughly consider the ways in which the lives of poor people actually worsen when previously accessible information, goods and services are rendered less convenient or completely unattainable by their migration online. Additionally, the …


Who Knew? Admissibility Of Subsequent Remedial Measures When Defendants Are Without Knowledge Of The Injuries, Mark G. Boyko, Ryan G. Vacca Jan 2007

Who Knew? Admissibility Of Subsequent Remedial Measures When Defendants Are Without Knowledge Of The Injuries, Mark G. Boyko, Ryan G. Vacca

Law Faculty Scholarship

Federal Rule of Evidence 407 prohibits the introduction of subsequent remedial measures for the purposes of demonstrating negligence, culpable conduct, or product defect. But the rule breaks down, in application and purpose, when a defendant undertakes the new safety measure after the plaintiff's injury, but before the defendant had knowledge of the loss. Such a situation is not uncommon. Would-be defendants frequently improve their products and product safety for a variety of reasons. Toxic exposure cases, where exposure often predates diagnosis of the injury by a decade or more, represent a prime example of cases where defendants are likely to …


Mississippi River Stories: Lessons From A Century Of Unnatural Disasters, Christine A. Klein, Sandra B. Zellmer Jan 2007

Mississippi River Stories: Lessons From A Century Of Unnatural Disasters, Christine A. Klein, Sandra B. Zellmer

UF Law Faculty Publications

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the nation pondered how a relatively weak Category 3 storm could have destroyed an entire region. Few appreciated the extent to which a flawed federal water development policy transformed this apparently natural disaster into a "manmade" disaster; fewer still appreciated how the disaster was the predictable, and indeed predicted, sequel to almost a century of similar disasters. This Article focuses upon three such stories: the Great Flood of 1927, the Midwest Flood of 1993, and Hurricanes Katrina and Rita of 2005. Taken together, the stories reveal important lessons, including the inadequacy of engineered flood …


Trademark Law And Status Signaling: Tattoos For The Privileged, Jeffrey L. Harrison Jan 2007

Trademark Law And Status Signaling: Tattoos For The Privileged, Jeffrey L. Harrison

UF Law Faculty Publications

The motivations for buying a good or service are highly complex. At the most basic level, people buy goods because of what the goods do or because of the aesthetic elements they embody. More technically, buyers derive utility from the "functional" quality of these goods. Another motivation relates to what the goods "say" about the buyer. Here, the good is a signaling device. Signaling is not new, of course, and can indicate anything from social class to political leanings.

This Essay addresses the issue of whether it should be public policy to subsidize this type of person-to-person status signaling. This …


Banking Law Reform And Users-Consumers In Developing Economies: Creating An Accessible And Equitable Consumer Base From The 'Excluded', Joseph J. Norton Jan 2007

Banking Law Reform And Users-Consumers In Developing Economies: Creating An Accessible And Equitable Consumer Base From The 'Excluded', Joseph J. Norton

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Drawing on over two decades of relevant experience, the author sets forth the primary proposition that the equitable and accessible provision of banking services has never been a core component of modern banking sector legal reform in developing countries. Over the course of the article, the author evaluates the past fifteen years of banking law reform for developing countries and considers recent World Bank efforts to address financial access and equity issues. The article also includes a discussion of the rise of microfinancing and private banking industry initiatives in South Africa. The author concludes with reflections on the importance of …


Walmart's Other Woman Problem: Sprawl And Work-Family Balancing, Katharine B. Silbaugh Jan 2007

Walmart's Other Woman Problem: Sprawl And Work-Family Balancing, Katharine B. Silbaugh

Faculty Scholarship

Wal-Mart is often said to be bad for its workers, including those workers in its production chain in developing countries, and good for its consumers, most of whom are women. Most people argue that its consumers gain from low prices. This brief essay argues that consumers absorb a share of the costs of Wal-Mart's low prices. Contrary to intuition, Wal-Mart may increase significantly the financial and time pressures on its shoppers, the majority of whom can ill-afford increases in either. Most small retail is sited to take advantage of travel routines people have already established to meet their residential and …


The Normative Foundations Of Trademark Law, Mark P. Mckenna Jan 2007

The Normative Foundations Of Trademark Law, Mark P. Mckenna

Journal Articles

This paper challenges the conventional wisdom that trademark law traditionally sought to protect consumers and enhance marketplace efficiency. Contrary to widespread contemporary understanding, early trademark cases were decidedly producer-centered. Trademark infringement claims, like all unfair competition claims, were intended to protect producers from illegitimate attempts to divert their trade. Consumer deception was relevant in these cases only to the extent it was the means by which a competitor diverted a producer's trade. Moreover, American courts from the very beginning protected a party against improperly diverted trade in part by recognizing a narrow form ofproperty rights in trademarks. Those rights were …


An Essay On The Need For Subsidized, Mandatory Long-Term Care Insurance, Lawrence A. Frolik Jan 2007

An Essay On The Need For Subsidized, Mandatory Long-Term Care Insurance, Lawrence A. Frolik

Articles

Imagine yourself in a room with 100 persons, all age sixty. Of the group, fifty-three are women and forty-seven are men. Racially and ethnically they mirror the population of Americans age sixty. Now answer the question: "Before the 100 die, how many will require long-term care and, on the average, for how many days and at what cost?" Give up? So do I. While it is common knowledge that many of us will need long-term care, no one seems to know how many will need such care or for how long. And some of you will ask, 'What do you …


Automobile Seatbelt Usage And The Value Of Statistical Life, W. Kip Viscusi, Jahn K. Hakes Jan 2007

Automobile Seatbelt Usage And The Value Of Statistical Life, W. Kip Viscusi, Jahn K. Hakes

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This article uses several within-sample tests to assess whether current seatbelt usage decisions are consistent with the stated preferences of survey respondents. The expressed survey values of statistical life are positively associated with the probability of seatbelt usage and are not statistically different from the values of statistical life implied by seatbelt usage decisions, which are in the $1.9 million to $8.4 million range. Seatbelt usage also varies in the expected manner with individual measures of heterogeneous attitudes toward risk, such as smoking status and education. Our evidence on seatbelt usage supports the view that consumers consistently balance expected safety …


The Consumer Compromise In Revised U.C.C. Article 9: The Shame Of It All, Charles W. Mooney Jr. Jan 2007

The Consumer Compromise In Revised U.C.C. Article 9: The Shame Of It All, Charles W. Mooney Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.


City Government And Predatory Lending, Jonathan L. Entin, Shadya Y. Yazback Jan 2007

City Government And Predatory Lending, Jonathan L. Entin, Shadya Y. Yazback

Faculty Publications

Predatory lending is heavily concentrated in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods and disproportionately affects minorities and the elderly. The consequences of predatory lending are devastating not only to the consumers who fall prey to unscrupulous lenders' tactics, but to the community as a whole. For these reasons, many cities have tried to regulate or prohibit the practice. These efforts face formidable legal obstacles, however. This article examines the problems that cities face in suing as parens patriae on behalf of their residents, the strong possibility that even home rule municipalities will find their efforts preempted by state law, and the growing …


The (Boundedly) Rational Basis Of Trademark Liability, Jeremy N. Sheff Jan 2007

The (Boundedly) Rational Basis Of Trademark Liability, Jeremy N. Sheff

Faculty Publications

This article argues that trademark infringement and dilution are best understood as commercial behavior that manipulates the cognitive biases of consumers, and as such threatens to render their heuristic judgments persistently inaccurate. In this view, trademark liability—whether imposed under the label of infringement or dilution—serves neither to protect property rights of trademark owners, nor to protect them against the unfair trade practices of competitors, but to shape consumer markets in such a way as to conform to the innate cognitive processes of boundedly rational consumers. The trademark regime can thus be understood as a legal apparatus designed (albeit perhaps unconsciously) …


It Depends On What The Meaning Of "False" Is: Falsity And Misleadingness In Commercial Speech Doctrine, Rebecca Tushnet Jan 2007

It Depends On What The Meaning Of "False" Is: Falsity And Misleadingness In Commercial Speech Doctrine, Rebecca Tushnet

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

While scholarship regarding the Supreme Court's noncommercial speech doctrine has often focused on the level of protection for truthful, non-misleading commercial speech, scholars have paid little attention to the exclusion of false or misleading commercial speech from all First Amendment protection. Examining the underpinnings of the false and misleading speech exclusion illuminates the practical difficulties that abolishing the commercial speech doctrine would pose. Through a series of fact patterns in trademark and false advertising cases, this piece demonstrates that defining what is false or misleading is often debatable. If commercial speech were given First Amendment protection, consumer protection and First …


Private Liability For Reckless Consumer Lending, John A. E. Pottow Jan 2007

Private Liability For Reckless Consumer Lending, John A. E. Pottow

Articles

Congress recently enacted amendments to the Bankruptcy Code that possess the overarching theme of cracking down on debtors due to the increasing rate at which individuals have been filing for bankruptcy. Taking into account the correlation between the overall rise in consumer credit card debt and the rate of individual bankruptcy filings, the author nevertheless hypothesizes that not all credit card debt is troubling. Instead, the author proposes that the catalyst driving individual bankruptcy rates higher than ever is the level of "bad credit"-or credit extended to individuals even though there is a reasonable likelihood that the individual will be …


Why The Customer Isn’T Always Right: Producer-Based Limits On Rights Accretion In Trademark, Rebecca Tushnet Jan 2007

Why The Customer Isn’T Always Right: Producer-Based Limits On Rights Accretion In Trademark, Rebecca Tushnet

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this article the author responds to James Gibson’s article Risk Aversion and Rights Accretion in Intellectual Property Law, which offers valuable insights into the extra-judicial dynamics that have contributed to the seemingly unending expansion of copyright and trademark rights over the past few decades. Her response focuses on the trademark side of that expansion. The theoretical basis for granting trademark rights is that, if consumers perceive that a mark or other symbol indicates that a single source is responsible for a product or service—whether through physical production, licensing, sponsorship, or other approval—then the law should give effect to …


Regulatory Beneficiaries And Informal Agency Policymaking, Nina A. Mendelson Jan 2007

Regulatory Beneficiaries And Informal Agency Policymaking, Nina A. Mendelson

Articles

Administrative agencies frequently use guidance documents to set policy broadly and prospectively in areas ranging from Department of Education Title IX enforcement to Food and Drug Administration regulation of direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising. In form, these guidances often closely resemble the policies agencies issue in ordinary notice-and-comment rulemaking. However, guidances are generally developed with little public participation and are often immune from judicial review. Nonetheless, guidances can prompt significant changes in behavior from those the agencies regulate. A number of commentators have guardedly defended the current state of affairs. Though guidances lack some important procedural safeguards, they can help agencies supervise …


Nsf Fees, James J. White Jan 2007

Nsf Fees, James J. White

Articles

Overdraft fees now make up more than half of banks' earnings on consumer checking accounts. In the past century, overdrafts have gone from the banker's scourge to the banker's profit center as bankers have learned that there is much to be made on these short term loans at breathtaking interest rates. I note that the federal agencies have been complicit in the growth of this form of lending. I propose that the banks and the agencies recognize the reality and attempt to mitigate these rates by encouraging the development of a competitive market.


Consumer Law As Tax Alternative, Rory Van Loo Jan 2007

Consumer Law As Tax Alternative, Rory Van Loo

Faculty Scholarship

Policymakers and scholars have in distributional conversations traditionally ignored consumer laws. Tax law dominates distributional conversations partly because legal rules are seen as less efficient and partly because consumer law research speaks to narrow and siloed contexts. Even millions of dollars in reduced credit card fees seem trivial compared to the trillion-dollar growth in income inequality that has sparked concern in recent decades. This Article is the first to synthesize the fragmented studies quantifying inefficiently higher consumer prices across diverse markets — called overcharge. These studies indicate that laws reducing overcharge could make a substantial reduction in inequality. Moreover, this …