Law Commons^™

Saving Charitable Settlements, Christine P. Bartholomew

Journal Articles

This Article defies the conventional wisdom that all charitable distributions from a class action settlement fund are types of cy pres. Instead, it proposes a radical delineation between “cy pres remainders” (meaning settlement funds left over after individual monetary distributions) and “charitable settlements” (meaning money initially distributed to charities as part of class action settlements). While both have cy pres roots, these two settlement structures have been conflated, jeopardizing the potential utility of charitable settlements. After articulating more precise nomenclature for these distinct distribution methods, this Article justifies why we must preserve charitable settlements. This defense is particularly timely, as …

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, …

It's Time To Remove The 'Mossified' Procedures For Ftc Rulemaking, Jeffrey Lubbers

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This article, prepared for The George Washington Law Review’s Symposium “The FTC at 100,” addresses the FTC’s rulemaking process — specifically the quasi-adjudicative process mandated by the Magnuson-Moss Warranty — Federal Trade Commission Improvement Act of 1975 and the additional procedures added by the Federal Trade Commission Improvements Act of 1980 (collectively called the “Magnuson-Moss Procedures”). The article compares how long it took the FTC to complete or terminate the rulemakings it undertook under the Magnuson-Moss Procedures (including amendments to previously issued rules) with the amount of time it took the FTC to issue rules under the “regular” Administrative Procedure …

Redefining Prey And Predator In Class Actions, Christine P. Bartholomew

Journal Articles

Aggregate litigation’s potential as a tool for the disempowered is not being realized. Class actions have come under serious attack in the last decade as critics have successfully worked to change traditional notions of victimhood. The leading narrative identifies big businesses as the vulnerable prey needing protection from large class claims and the greedy class actions attorneys who bring them. Relying on this narrative, courts and Congress have made class actions harder to pursue, from filing and class certification to settlement approval.

Vulnerability theory offers an alternative framework to rehabilitate class actions. From this perspective, the legal system currently disadvantages …

Who Regulates The Robots, Margot Kaminski

Publications

No abstract provided.

Putting Disclosure To The Test: Toward Better Evidence-Based Policy, Talia B. Gillis

Faculty Scholarship

Financial disclosures no longer enjoy the immunity from criticism they once had. While disclosures remain the hallmark of numerous areas of regulation, there is increasing skepticism as to whether disclosures are understood by consumers and do in fact improve consumer welfare. Debates on the virtues of disclosures overlook the process by which regulators continue to mandate disclosures. This article fills this gap by analyzing the testing of proposed disclosures, which is an increasingly popular way for regulators to establish the benefits of disclosure. If the testing methodology is misguided then the premise on which disclosures are adopted is flawed, leaving …

Regulating For The First Time The Decision To Grant Consumer Credit: A Look At The First Steps Taken By The United States And Australia, Jeffrey Davis

UF Law Faculty Publications

In this Article, I discuss the changes in three consumer-credit realms. First, I compare the Australian regime applicable to all forms of consumer credit granting, including mortgage lending, to the American regulation of the consumer mortgage-granting decision. Second, I compare the Australian and American approaches to the decision to authorize use of, or increase the credit limit on, individual credit cards. Third, I compare the two approaches to regulating small short-term loans, usually called payday loans. Finally, I compare the enforcement regimes of both countries — perhaps the key to it all.