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Articles 1 - 5 of 5
Full-Text Articles in Consumer Protection Law
Consumer Law As An Axis Of Economic Inequality, Daniel Markovits, Barak D. Richman, Rory Van Loo
Consumer Law As An Axis Of Economic Inequality, Daniel Markovits, Barak D. Richman, Rory Van Loo
Faculty Scholarship
In the standard paradigm of consumer law, a voluntary transaction is supposed to be welfare enhancing for each of the parties involved. We challenge this foundational presumption and ask to what extent many common consumer contracts are in fact extractive despite resulting from voluntary exchanges. With inequality growing throughout the world, to a degree that threatens the stability of both the economies and governments of even the wealthiest nations, we ask this fundamental question in an effort to identify root causes of inequality and to mark some guideposts for the articles that follow. Taken together, our speculations suggest that the …
Racialized Tax Inequity: Wealth, Racism, And The U.S. System Of Taxation, Palma Joy Strand, Nicholas A. Mirkay
Racialized Tax Inequity: Wealth, Racism, And The U.S. System Of Taxation, Palma Joy Strand, Nicholas A. Mirkay
Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy
This Article describes the connection between wealth inequality and the increasing structural racism in the U.S. tax system since the 1980s. A long-term sociological view (the why) reveals the historical racialization of wealth and a shift in the tax system overall beginning around 1980 to protect and exacerbate wealth inequality, which has been fueled by racial animus and anxiety. A critical tax view (the how) highlights a shift over the same time period at both federal and state levels from taxes on wealth, to taxes on income, and then to taxes on consumption—from greater to less progressivity. Both of these …
Debt In Just Societies: A General Framework For Regulating Credit, John Linarelli
Debt In Just Societies: A General Framework For Regulating Credit, John Linarelli
Scholarly Works
Debt presents a dilemma to societies: successful societies benefit from a substantial infrastructure of consumer, commercial, corporate, and sovereign debt but debt can cause substantial private and social harm. Pre- and post-crisis solutions have seesawed between subsidizing and restricting debt, between leveraging and deleveraging. A consensus exists among governments and international financial institutions that financial stability is the fundamental normative principle underlying financial regulation. Financial stability, however, is insensitive to equality concerns and can produce morally impermissible aggregations in which the least advantaged in a society are made worse off. Solutions based only on financial stability can restrict debt without …
Broadening Consumer Law: Competition, Protection, And Distribution, Rory Van Loo
Broadening Consumer Law: Competition, Protection, And Distribution, Rory Van Loo
Faculty Scholarship
Policymakers and scholars have in distributional conversations traditionally ignored consumer laws, defined as the set of consumer protection, antitrust, and entry barrier laws that govern consumer transactions. Consumer law is overlooked partly because tax law is cast as the most efficient way to redistribute. Another obstacle is that consumer law research speaks to microeconomic and siloed contexts—deceptive fees by Wells Fargo or a proposed merger between Comcast and Time Warner Cable. Even removing millions of dollars of deceptive credit card fees across the nation seems trivial compared to the trillion-dollar growth in income inequality that has sparked concern in recent …
Helping Buyers Beware: The Need For Supervision Of Big Retail, Rory Van Loo
Helping Buyers Beware: The Need For Supervision Of Big Retail, Rory Van Loo
Faculty Scholarship
Since the financial crisis, consumer regulators have closely supervised sellers of credit cards and home mortgages to stamp out anticompetitive practices. Supervision programs give financial regulators ongoing access to sophisticated firms' internal data outside the litigation process. This often enables examiners to identify and correct harmful conduct more rapidly and effectively than would be possible using publicly available information and cumbersome legal tools.
Consumers spend four times more on retail goods than on financial products. The retail sector’s dominant firms — such as Amazon, Walmart, Unilever, and Kraft — employ large teams of quantitative experts armed with advanced information technologies, …