Law Commons^™

Towards A Basal Tenth Amendment: A Riposte To National Bank Preemption Of State Consumer Protection Laws, Keith R. Fisher

ExpressO

Recent regulations promulgated by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency assert a sweeping authority to preempt a broad array of state laws, including consumer protection laws, applicable not only to national banks but to their state-chartered operating subsidiaries. These regulations threaten to disrupt state efforts to combat predatory lending and other abusive practices and to interfere with a state’s sovereign authority over corporations chartered under its laws. Yet federal courts faced with challenges to these initiatives have failed to devote any substantial analysis to claims based on the Tenth Amendment. The problem with such claims is the absence …

Bankruptcy Abuse: An Empirical Study Of Consumer Exemptions Cases, Bernard Trujillo

ExpressO

On April 20, 2005, the President of the United States signed a sweeping legislative overhaul of the consumer bankruptcy system. The bankruptcy reform legislation is based on an empirical assertion: that sophisticated debtors with the means to re-pay their debts were instead filing for bankruptcy and acquiring a discharge, thereby abusing the bankruptcy system.

This Article presents the results of an empirical study of bankruptcy court doctrine in consumer exemptions proceedings over a twenty-year period. The findings suggest a serious empirical flaw in the premise of the bankruptcy reform legislation. The study shows that the bankruptcy system minimizes abuse by …

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 …

Breaking The Bank: Revisiting Central Bank Of Denver After Enron And Sarbanes-Oxley, Celia Taylor

ExpressO

No abstract provided.

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 …

A Model For Emergency Service Of Voip Through Certification And Labeling, Patrick S. Ryan, Tom Lookabaugh, Douglas Sicker

ExpressO

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) will transform many aspects of traditional telephony service, including the technology, the business models, and the regulatory constructs that govern such service. Perhaps not unexpectedly, this transformation is generating a host of technical, business, social, and policy problems. In attempting to respond to these problems, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) could mandate obligations or specific solutions to VoIP policy issues; however, it is instead looking first to industry initiatives focused on the key functionality that users have come to expect of telecommunications services. High among this list of desired functionality is user access to emergency …

Intellectual Property Rights In Digital Media: A Comparative Analysis Of Legal Protection, Technological Measures And New Business Models Under E.U. And U.S. Law, Nicola Lucchi

ExpressO

The production of digital content is a phenomenon which has completely changed the conditions of access to knowledge. Within this framework it becomes even more important to find and to formulate a new settlement for intellectual property rights balancing contrasted rights. Owners of the old technology and policy makers have found two different solutions and remedies for intellectual property rights: legal and technological. When both remedies work together any rights that a consumer may have under copyright law could be replaced by a unilaterally defined contractual term and condition. To balance this inequity this article analyses different solutions under U.S. …

Is Tiger Woods’S Swing Really A Work Of Art? Defining The Line Between The Right Of Publicity And The First Amendment, Michael R. Suppappola

ExpressO

My Comment, “Is Tiger Woods’s Swing Really a Work of Art? Defining the Line Between the Right of Publicity and the First Amendment,” focuses on the controversial “right of publicity,” a legal doctrine which is now recognized in the majority of states either at common law or by statute. The right of publicity allows athletes and celebrities to exclude others from using an entertainer’s likeness or image absent express permission. Although advocates claim that the right is needed to allow celebrities to profit from their own labor and goodwill, my Comment outlines how the right of publicity endangers traditional First …

Material Vulnerabilities: Data Privacy, Corporate Information Security And Securities Regulation, Andrea M. Matwyshyn

ExpressO

This article undertakes a normative and empirical legal inquiry into the manner information security vulnerabilities are being addressed through law and in the marketplace. Specifically, this article questions the current legislative paradigm for information security regulation by presenting a critique grounded in information security and cryptography theory. Consequently, this article advocates shifting our regulatory approach to a process-based security paradigm that focuses on improving security of our system as a whole. Finally, this article argues that in order to accomplish this shift with least disruption to current legal and economic processes, expanding an existing set of well-functioning legal structures is …

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 …

Major Lenders' May Violate Due Process By Enforcing One-Sided Arbitration Contracts To Avoid Borrowers' Defenses To Foreclosure, Lynn E. Cunningham

ExpressO

ARTICLE SUMMARY: Many major, contemporary players in the huge sub-prime U.S. mortgage lending market require their borrowers to execute loan agreement riders requiring arbitration of all disputes with regard to the loan transaction, but with the significant exception of the lender’s right to foreclose. While such agreements have frequently been challenged on unconscionability grounds, enforcement of the ex parte aspects of such contracts also raises concerns about compliance with procedural aspects of the Due Process Clause, when either lender enforcement of the loan agreement itself or foreclosure is sought through the courts. Foreclosure normally occurs more promptly than arbitration, and …