Law Commons^™

Not-So-Smartphone Disclosures, Jeff Sovern, Nahal Heydari

Arkansas Law Review

The consumer credit market, and particularly the credit card market, lacks perfect competition. Though usury laws and regulation of charges are germane to our findings, this Article focuses largely on disclosure. Specifically, we examine whether consumers understand the disclosures mandated for credit cards in the medium in which many consumers now engage in financial transactions. This Article proceeds as follows: Part I presents some basics on consumer protections for credit cards. Part II reviews the literature concerning disclosures on smartphones. Part III discusses our methodology. Part IV reports our findings. Part V suggests some normative implications.

After Ftx: Can The Original Bitcoin Use Case Be Saved?, Mark Burge

Faculty Scholarship

Bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies spawned by the innovation of blockchain programming have exploded in prominence, both in gains of massive market value and in dramatic market losses, the latter most notably seen in connection with the failure of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange in November 2022. After years of investment and speculation, however, something crucial has faded: the original use case for Bitcoin as a system of payment. Can cryptocurrency-as-a-payment-system be saved, or are day traders and speculators the actual cryptocurrency future? This article suggests that cryptocurrency has been hobbled by a lack of foundational commercial and consumer-protection law that …

Consumer Protection Of Persons With Disabilities Amidst The Covid-19, James Keith C. Heffron

Center for Business Research and Development

The Persons with Disabilities (PWD) sector was one of the most overlooked and affected sectors during the COVID-19 pandemic. As consumers, PWDs have suffered difficult challenges in the access of essential goods and services, including healthcare, and these challenges have been unduly aggravated because of the crisis. The article exposes and examines the negative impact of the crisis on the consumer rights and behavior of PWDs with a special focus on the novel barriers brought about by the pandemic on their right to access. The current pre-pandemic legislation is not adequate to protect PWDs from these novel barriers as there …

Benign Language On Letters From Debt Collectors And Avoiding Violations Of The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, Sebastian West

University of Cincinnati Law Review

No abstract provided.

Equalizing The Playing Field: The Time Has Come For Secondary Meaning In The Making In Small Restaurant Trade Dress Infringement Cases, John Pesek

Journal of Food Law & Policy

Imagine it is opening day for your first restaurant. It has taken months, if not years, to get to this point and you have spent a lot of money in developing the menu, artist style, and feel for the restaurant. A few months after the opening of your restaurant, a competing restaurant, right down the block from your restaurant, opens its doors; its menu and overall look are virtually indistinguishable from your restaurant. You are left wondering what remedies, if any, you have as a small restaurant owner. This was the case for Chef Rebecca Charles and her Pearl Oyster …

Algorithmic Personalized Pricing, Pascale Chapdelaine

Law Publications

Price is an essential term at the heart of supplier-consumer transactions and relationships increasingly taking place in “micro-marketplace chambers,” where points of comparison with similar relevant products may be difficult to discern and time-consuming to make. This article critically reviews recent legal and economic academic literature, policy reports on algorithmic personalized pricing (i.e. setting prices according to consumers’ personal characteristics to target their willingness to pay), as well as recent developments in privacy regulation, competition law, and policy discourse, to derive the guiding norms that should inform the regulation of this practice, predominantly from a consumer protection perspective. Looking more …

What’S In Your Wallet (And What Should The Law Do About It?), Natasha Sarin

All Faculty Scholarship

In traditional markets, firms can charge prices that are significantly elevated relative to their costs only if there is a market failure. However, this is not true in a two-sided market (like Amazon, Uber, and Mastercard), where firms often subsidize one side of the market and generate revenue from the other. This means consideration of one side of the market in isolation is problematic. The Court embraced this view in Ohio v. American Express, requiring that anticompetitive harm on one side of a two-sided market be weighed against benefits on the other side.

Legal scholars denounce this decision, which, …

Commercial Speech Protection As Consumer Protection, Felix T. Wu

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.

Online Dispute Resolution, Ronald A. Brand

Articles

This chapter was prepared from a presentation given by the author at the 2019 Summer School in Transnational Commercial Law & Technology, jointly sponsored by the University of Verona School of Law and the Center for International Legal Education (CILE) of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. In the paper, I review online dispute resolution (ODR) by considering the following five questions, which I believe help to develop a better understanding of both the concept and the legal framework surrounding it:

A. What is ODR?

B. Who does ODR?

C. What is the legal framework for ODR?

D. What …

Apple Pay, Bitcoin, And Consumers: The Abcs Of Future Public Payments Law, Mark Edwin Burge

Mark Edwin Burge

E-Commerce, Cyber, And Electronic Payment System Risks: Lessons From Paypal, Lawrence J. Trautman

Lawrence J. Trautman Sr.

By now, almost without exception, every business has an internet presence, and is likely engaged in e-commerce. What are the major risks perceived by those engaged in e-commerce and electronic payment systems? What potential risks, if they become reality, may cause substantial increases in operating costs or threaten the very survival of the enterprise? This article utilizes the relevant annual report disclosures from eBay (parent of PayPal), along with other eBay and PayPal documents, as a potentially powerful teaching device. Most of the descriptive language to follow is excerpted directly from eBay’s regulatory filings. My additions include weaving these materials …

La Directiva 2005/29/Ce Relativa A Las Prácticas Comerciales Desleales: Su Aplicación En La Protección De Los Consumidores De Productos Alimenticios, Luis González Vaqué

Luis González Vaqué

Directive 2005/29/EC on Unfair Commercial Practices was adopted on 11 May 2005 to help consumers benefit from the Internal Market by removing regulatory barriers, deriving from divergent national rules, which discouraged firms from selling and undermined consumers’ trust in buying across the EU. It provides for a high level of consumer protection in all sectors and works as a “safety net” that fills the gaps which are not regulated by other EU sector-specific rules. As far as some practices are not regulated by specific Food Law rules, Directive 2005/29/EC ensures also that foodstuffs consumers are not misled or exposed to …

Consumer Protection, Hijacking And The Concepcion Cases, Brandy G. Robinson

Brandy G Robinson

Since its ruling, AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion has been the subject of scrutiny among many people in both the business and legal industries. The ruling’s significance denotes class arbitration is no longer a viable option in certain types of litigation matters. Yet, courts continue to defy this ruling. Post-Concepcion cases help in exploring why there is such a discord and confusion on whether class arbitration or any class alternative dispute resolution method are allowable.This article briefly examines AT&T Mobility LLC v. Concepcion and post-Concepcion cases and what remains for consumers and consumer law attorneys after Concepcion. The article also provides …

E-Commerce And Electronic Payment System Risks: Lessons From Paypal, Lawrence J. Trautman

Lawrence J. Trautman Sr.

What are the major risks perceived by those engaged in e-commerce and electronic payment systems? What development risks, if they become reality, may cause substantial increases in operating costs or threaten the very survival of the enterprise? This article utilizes the relevant annual report disclosures from eBay (parent of PayPal), along with other eBay and PayPal documents, as a potentially powerful teaching device. Most of the descriptive language to follow is excerpted directly from eBay’s regulatory filings. My additions include weaving these materials into a logical presentation and providing supplemental sources for those who desire a deeper look (usually in …

Personal Guarantees And Sureties Between Commercial Law And Consumers In The United States, Christoph Henkel

Journal Articles

Guaranties and suretyships reduce the risk of default and today remain essential arrangements in many commercial and consumer transactions. A guarantor or surety promises to pay for the debt of a third party and may become primarily liable on that debt. Despite the significance of such a promise and the resulting obligation, U.S. law does not clearly distinguish between a guarantor and surety in a consumer or commercial context. This is of particular relevance, because in a consumer context a guaranty often has a gratuitous or sentimental element and a guarantor may not always be fully aware of the risks …

E-Commerce And Electronic Payment System Risks: Lessons From Paypal, Lawrence J. Trautman

Lawrence J. Trautman Sr.

What are the major risks perceived by those engaged in e-commerce and electronic payment systems? What development risks, if they become reality, may cause substantial increases in operating costs or threaten the very survival of the enterprise? This article utilizes the relevant annual report disclosures from eBay (parent of PayPal), along with other eBay and PayPal documents, as a potentially powerful teaching device. Most of the descriptive language to follow is excerpted directly from eBay’s regulatory filings. My additions include weaving these materials into a logical presentation and providing supplemental sources for those who desire a deeper look (usually in …

Privacy, Transparency & Google's Blurred Glass, Jonathan I. Ezor

Jonathan I. Ezor

No matter the context or jurisdiction, one concept underlies every view of the best practices in data privacy: transparency. The mandate to disclose what personal information is collected, how it is used, and with whom and for what purpose it is shared, is essential to enable informed consent to the collection, along with the other user rights that constitute privacy best practices. Google, which claims to support and offer transparency, is increasingly opaque about its many products and services and the information they collect for it, posing a significant privacy concern.

An Overview And Analysis Of The National Unfair Contract Terms Provisions, Loren Holly, Dan Jerker B. Svantesson

Dan Svantesson

The Commonwealth Parliament has recently introduced the Australian Consumer Law, a legislative regime for a national consumer protection framework. One of the most significant changes to consumer protection within Australia has been the introduction of provisions governing unfair contract terms within consumer contracts. This article outlines the new provisions and examines the way in which the law is likely to be applied by the courts, with reference to relevant case law relating to similar provisions found in legislation in Victoria and New South Wales and United Kingdom.

The Rome I Regulation Rules On Party Autonomy For Choice Of Law: A U.S. Perspective, Ronald A. Brand

Articles

This chapter was presented at a conference in Dublin on the (then) new Rome I Regulation of the European Union in the fall of 2009. It contrasts the Rome I rules on party autonomy with those in the United States. In particular, it considers the rules in the Rome I Regulation that ostensibly protect consumers by discouraging party agreement on a pre-dispute basis to the law governing a consumer contract. These rules are compared with the absence of private international law restrictions on choice of forum and choice of law in the United States, even in consumer contracts. The result …

Commercial Transactions And Consumer Protection, James R. Mccall

Cal Law Trends and Developments

Because the preceding edition of this publication did not contain an article on trends in commercial transactions or consumer protection in California, this article will discuss selected decisions and developments in those fields during the years 1968 and 1969. The principal focus of this article will be the significant decisions made during this period that interpret or relate to the principal statutes in the two fields: the California Commercial Code, the Rees-Levering Automobile Sales Finance Act, and the Unruh Retail Installment Sales Act. These legislative enactments establish a comprehensive statutory pattern for regulation of all aspects of commercial law in …

Predatory Structured Finance, Christopher L. Peterson

ExpressO

Predatory lending is a real, pervasive, and destructive problem as demonstrated by record settlements, jury awards, media exposes, and a large body of empirical scholarship. Currently the national debate over predatory mortgage lending is shifting to the controversial question of who should bear liability for predatory lending practices. In today’s subprime mortgage market, originators and brokers quickly assign home loans through a complex and opaque series of transactions involving as many as a dozen different strategically organized companies. Loans are typically transferred into large pools, and then income from those loans is “structured” to appeal to different types of investors. …

Exclusionary Conduct, Effect On Consumers, And The Flawed Profit-Sacrifice Standard, Steven C. Salop

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The central thesis of this article is that the use of the profit-sacrifice test as the sole liability standard for exclusionary conduct, or as a required prong of a multi-pronged liability standard is fundamentally flawed. The profit-sacrifice test may be useful, for example, as one type of evidence of anticompetitive purpose. In unilateral refusal to deal cases, it can be useful in determining the non-exclusionary benchmark. However, the test is not generally a reliable indicator of the impact of allegedly exclusionary conduct on consumer welfare - the primary focus of the antitrust laws. The profit-sacrifice test also is prone to …

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 …

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 …

Consumer And Employment Arbitration Law In Comparative Perspective: The Importance Of The Civil Jury, Stephen J. Ware

University of Miami Law Review

No abstract provided.

Is The U.S. Out On A Limb? Comparing The U.S. Approach To Mandatory Consumer And Employment Arbitration To That Of The Rest Of The World, Jean R. Sternlight

University of Miami Law Review

No abstract provided.

Aviation Law And Regulation: Abridged Student Edition, Robert M. Hardaway, Paul Stephen Dempsey, William E. Thoms

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

We sought to write a comprehensive reference book for aviation lawyers and practitioners, and airline and aircraft manufactuing executives in need of vital information regarding law and government regulation in the field of commercial and general aviation. We envision this book as an aid for the neophyte and experienced practitioner alike.

Aviation Law And Regulation, Robert M. Hardaway, Paul Stephen Dempsey, William E. Thoms

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

We sought to write a comprehensive reference book for aviation lawyers and practitioners, and airline and aircraft manufactuing executives in need of vital information regarding law and government regulation in the field of commercial and general aviation. We envision this book as an aid for the neophyte and experienced practitioner alike.

Is Revision Due For Article 2, Fairfax Leary Jr., David Frisch

Villanova Law Review

No abstract provided.