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Articles 1 - 6 of 6
Full-Text Articles in Law
Portraits Of Bankruptcy Filers, Pamela Foohey, Robert M. Lawless, Deborah Thorne
Portraits Of Bankruptcy Filers, Pamela Foohey, Robert M. Lawless, Deborah Thorne
Articles
One in ten adult Americans has turned to the consumer bankruptcy system for help. For almost forty years, the only systematic data collection about the people who file bankruptcy has come from the Consumer Bankruptcy Project (CBP), for which we serve as co-principal investigators. In this Article, we use CBP data from 2013 to 2019 to describe who is using the bankruptcy system, providing the first comprehensive overview of bankruptcy filers in thirty years. We use principal component analysis to leverage these data to identify distinct groups of people who file bankruptcy. This technique allows us to situate the distinctions …
Credit Scoring Duality, Pamela Foohey, Sara Sternberg Greene
Credit Scoring Duality, Pamela Foohey, Sara Sternberg Greene
Articles
Credit scoring is central to people’s financial growth and prosperity or financial decline and stagnation. People with a good credit score and accompanying credit report can buy opportunities to advance economically. The benefits they reap from their attractiveness to lenders and employers helps feed their future success. In contrast, people with a fair or poor credit score become stuck in cycle of high interest rates and costly loan terms, large required down payments, and denied applications for rentals, cell phone plans, and employment. Employers, service providers, lenders, and alternative financial service providers have begun to use alternative credit scoring models, …
Steering Loan Modifications Post-Pandemic, Pamela Foohey, Dalie Jimenez, Christopher K. Odinet
Steering Loan Modifications Post-Pandemic, Pamela Foohey, Dalie Jimenez, Christopher K. Odinet
Articles
As part of federal and state relief programs created during the COVID-19 pandemic, many American households received pauses on their largest debts, particularly on mortgages and student loans. Others may have come to agreements with their lenders, likewise pausing or altering payment on other debts, such as auto loans and credit cards. This relief allowed households to allocate their savings and income to necessary expenses, like groceries, utilities, and medicine. But forbearance does not equal forgiveness. At the end of the various relief periods and moratoria, people will have to resume paying all their debts, the amounts of which may …
Ability To Pay, John A. E. Pottow
Ability To Pay, John A. E. Pottow
Articles
The landmark Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 ("Dodd-Frank") transforms the regulation of consumer credit in the United States. Many of its changes have been high-profile, attracting considerable media and scholarly attention, most notably the establishment of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ("CFPB"). Even specific consumer reforms, such as a so-called "plain vanilla" proposal, drew hot debate and lobbying firepower. But when the dust settled, one profoundly transformative innovation that did not garner the same outrage as plain vanilla or the CFPB did get into the law: imposing upon lenders a duty to assure a borrower's ability to repay. Ensuring a borrower's …
Private Liability For Reckless Consumer Lending, John A. E. Pottow
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 …
The Usury Trompe L'Oeil, James J. White
The Usury Trompe L'Oeil, James J. White
Articles
This Article demonstrates how the interaction of a federal statute passed in 1864,1 a case decided by the Supreme Court in 1978,2 and modem technology has legally debarred every state legislature from controlling consumer interest rates in its state-but not from passing laws that appear to do so-and has politically debarred the Congress from setting federal rates to replace the state rates. As a consequence, the elaborate usury laws on the books of most states are only a trompe l'oeil, a "visual deception... rendered in extremely fine detail ... ." The presence of these finely detailed laws gives the illusion …