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Full-Text Articles in Law
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 …
Digital Market Perfection, Rory Van Loo
Digital Market Perfection, Rory Van Loo
Faculty Scholarship
Google’s, Apple’s, and other companies’ automated assistants are increasingly serving as personal shoppers. These digital intermediaries will save us time by purchasing grocery items, transferring bank accounts, and subscribing to cable. The literature has only begun to hint at the paradigm shift needed to navigate the legal risks and rewards of this coming era of automated commerce. This Article begins to fill that gap first by surveying legal battles related to contract exit, data access, and deception that will determine the extent to which automated assistants are able to help consumers to search and switch, potentially bringing tremendous societal benefits. …
Technology Regulation By Default: Platforms, Privacy, And The Cfpb, Rory Van Loo
Technology Regulation By Default: Platforms, Privacy, And The Cfpb, Rory Van Loo
Faculty Scholarship
In the absence of a technology-focused regulator, diverse administrative agencies have been forced to develop regulatory models for governing their sphere of the data economy. These largely uncoordinated efforts offer a laboratory of regulatory experimentation on governance architecture. This symposium essay explores what the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has done in its first several years to regulate financial technology (“fintech”), in the context of broader technology-related concerns identified in the literature. It begins with a survey of what the CFPB has undertaken using more traditional administrative agency tools—enforcement and rulemaking—in areas such as privacy, consumer control over data, and …
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, …
Balancing Of Markets, Litigation And Regulation, Keith N. Hylton, Larry E. Ribstein, Paul H. Rubin, Todd J. Zywicki
Balancing Of Markets, Litigation And Regulation, Keith N. Hylton, Larry E. Ribstein, Paul H. Rubin, Todd J. Zywicki
Faculty Scholarship
In addition to judicial education programs that the Law and Economics Center conducts, we also have a division that focuses on public policy research, known as the Searle Civil Justice Institute. In November, we held a public policy roundtable where we commissioned a variety of research and brought together a group of experts, both academic and practitioner experts, to discuss the issue of balancing the appropriate roles of markets, litigation, and regulation. And the notion there is that each one - markets, litigation, and regulation - can and probably should play a role in addressing various consumer harms.