Consumer Protection Law Commons^™

Multidistrict Litigation: A Surprising Bonus For Pro Se Plaintiffs And A Possible Boon For Consumers, Danielle D'Onfro

Scholarship@WashULaw

Conventional wisdom says that pro se plaintiffs almost invariably fare worse than represented plaintiffs. However, there exists in federal court a procedural regime under which pro se plaintiffs effectively receive attorneys and therefore experience success rates similar to their represented peers: multidistrict litigation. Multidistrict litigation is a procedure for consolidating multiple federal civil cases sharing common questions of fact into a single proceeding in one federal district court for coordinated pre-trial proceedings and discovery. This paper takes an empirical look at all federal civil cases terminating between 2006 and 2008 to determine what effect multidistrict litigation has on case outcome …

The Effect Of The Consumer Financial Protection Agency Act Of 2009 On Consumer Credit, David S. Evans, Joshua D. Wright

Loyola Consumer Law Review

No abstract provided.

Health Care Reform Impacts Student Lending And Pell Grant Programs, Kyle Gaffaney

Loyola Consumer Law Review

No abstract provided.

How To Avoid The Constraints Of Rule 10b-5(B): A First Circuit Guide For Underwriters, 43 J. Marshall L. Rev. 931 (2010), Eric H. Franklin

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Does An Economic Crisis Merit A Prima Facie Finding Of "Exigent Circumstances" Or Other Emergency Relief? The Impact Of The Credit Counseling Provision Of Bapcpa Upon Distressed Homeowners In A Severe National Economic Downturn, 44 J. Marshall L. Rev. 129 (2010), Gloria J. Liddell, Pearson Liddell Jr., Michael J. Highfield

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Screen, Stabilize, And Ship: Emtala, U.S. Hospitals, And Undocumented Immigrants (International Patient Dumping), Jennifer M. Smith

Journal Publications

Pursuant to the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA), patient dumping is illegal in the United States. American hospitals cannot inappropriately discharge or transfer unstable patients to other medical facilities in the United States without violating EMTALA. Yet, American hospitals are doing this very thing- international patient dumping, by inappropriately transferring or discharging (i.e. shipping) indigent undocumented immigrants in arguably unstable conditions to Third World medical facilities in the home country of the immigrant absent federal government oversight or compliance with EMTALA.

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.

Cooling-Off And Secondary Markets: Consumer Choice In The Digital Domain, Michael Mattioli

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This article studies the law and economics of cooling-off periods and secondary markets for online media. The discussion is fueled by a current debate: In July 2009, the online retail juggernaut, Amazon.com, remotely deleted literary classics from consumers’ portable “Kindle” reading devices. The public outcry and class-action lawsuit that followed have reinvigorated an ongoing debate about how much control digital media distributors should wield. Pundits and plaintiffs argue that too often, digital distributors like Amazon impair consumer freedom by misusing Digital Rights Management (DRM) software systems. However, these same systems could also provide significant benefits that have largely gone ignored. …

Counterparty Regulation And Its Limits: The Evolution Of The Credit Default Swaps Market, Houman B. Shadab

Articles & Chapters

Over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives are widely regarded as “unregulated” financial instruments. While it is true that OTC derivatives are subject to relatively minimal federal regulation, OTC derivatives are in fact subject to a robust form of control and governance in the form of counterparty regulation. Counterparty regulation arises when two or more parties are continually exposed to counterparty credit risk for the duration of a long-term contract, and it consists of specific governance mechanisms such as the daily adjustment of collateral and the netting out of redundant trades. Counterparty regulation governs derivatives transactions but not securities transactions.

This essay reviews recent …

Class Dismissed: Contemporary Judicial Hostility To Small-Claims Consumer Class Actions, Myriam E. Gilles

Articles

I start from the view that small-value consumer claims are a primary reason that class actions exist, and that without class actions many - if not most - of the wrongs perpetrated upon small-claims consumers would not be capable of redress. It would then seem to follow that the class action device should be readily available in small-claims consumer cases. And yet, over the past decade, federal district courts have repeatedly declined to certify class actions on grounds that are specific to small-claims consumer cases. Foremost among those grounds is the notion that the federal class action rule carries within …

Is Local Consumer Protection Law A Better Retributive Mechanism Than The Tax System, Brian Galle

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

As Judge Calabresi has argued, preemption decisions are, at their core, a choice about which tier of government should have policy-making authority. In prior work, Mark Seidenfeld and I argued that the choice of whether or not to preempt state law decisions should be based explicitly on "fiscal federalism" considerations. The economic discipline of fiscal federalism attempts to measure the welfare effects of situating a given policy either locally, nationally, or somewhere in between.

Unfair Competition And Uncommon Sense, Rebecca Tushnet

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article discusses Mark McKenna’s Testing Modern Trademark Law’s Theory of Harm as an important step forward in challenging trademark expansionism, going back to basics and asking us to assess for truth value several propositions that now seem so self-evident to lawyers and judges as to not require any empirical support at all. Like McKenna, the author believes that if the law looked for the evidence behind present axioms of harm, it would not find much there. McKenna and the author share an interest in empirical evidence on marketing and a desire to bring its insights to trademark law. But …

Credit For Motherhood, Melissa Jacoby

Melissa B. Jacoby

This essay builds on prior work exploring the impact of consumer lenders who sell credit products for assisted reproduction and adoption. After reviewing some basic attributes of the parenthood lending market, the essay discusses how not-for-profit lenders promote traditional conceptions of motherhood and the division of carework in ways that credit discrimination laws were not designed to address. The essay also articulates some incentives of for-profit lenders to sell motherhood and potential implications for women who are ambivalent about becoming parents.

The People's Agents And The Battle To Protect The American Public, Rena Steinzor, Sidney Shapiro

Rena I. Steinzor

Reasonable people disagree about the reach of the federal government, but there is near-universal consensus that it should protect us from such dangers as bacteria-infested food, harmful drugs, toxic pollution, crumbling bridges, and unsafe toys. And yet, the agencies that shoulder these responsibilities are in shambles; if they continue to decline, lives will be lost and natural resources will be squandered. In this timely book, Rena Steinzor and Sidney Shapiro take a hard look at the tangled web of problems that have led to this dire state of affairs.

It turns out that the agencies are not primarily to blame …

Managing Medical Bills On The Brink Of Bankruptcy, Melissa B. Jacoby, Mirya Holman

Melissa B. Jacoby

This paper presents original empirical evidence on financial interactions between medical providers and their patients who go bankrupt. We use a nationally representative sample of people who filed for bankruptcy in 2007 to compare two popular but hotly contested methods of measuring medical burden. By applying both methods to the same filers, we find that nearly four out of five respondents had some financial obligation for medical care not covered by insurance in the two years prior to filing as measured by the survey method. The court record method paints a different picture, with only half of the cases containing …

Los Anteproyectos Del Código De Consumo: ¿Hacia Una Codificación Coherente O Una Legislación Especial Asistemática?, Rómulo Morales Hervias

Rómulo Morales Hervias

Los anteproyectos de un Código de Consumo para el Perú importan normativas de protección al consumidor de Europa y Sudamérica sin considerar que el Derecho Civil es el conjunto normativo, doctrinario y jurisprudencial más adecuado para proteger al consumidor.

Unbranding, Confusion & Deception, Aaron K. Perzanowski

Aaron K. Perzanowski

This Article addresses the phenomenon of unbranding. Unbranding occurs when a firm chooses to discontinue its use of a brand that has developed negative associations among consumers in favor of a new brand, often in hopes of escaping the consequences of inferior products or illegal activity. Companies like AIG, Blackwater, Philip Morris, and WorldComm have all employed this strategy in recent years. Unbranding represents a striking departure from branding orthodoxy, which stresses the maintenance of brand equity through the gradual evolution of a brand. After examining the factors that prompt firms to take the radical step of eliminating an established …

El Procedimiento Administrativo Y Las Facultades De La Autoridad En Materia De Represión De La Competencia Desleal. Apuntes Sobre El Decreto Legislativo N° 1044, Pierino Stucchi

Pierino Stucchi

No abstract provided.

La Injustificada Negativa De La Cancelación Unilateral De La Hipoteca Unilateral, Rómulo Morales

Rómulo Martín Morales Hervias

En este artículo se realiza una crítica frontal a las resoluciones del Tribunal Registral, doctrina nacional y normativa registral que propugnan injustificadamente la imposibilidad de cancelación unilateral de la hipoteca unilateral.

Educación Jurídica Y Derecho Civil. Una Propuesta De Reforma Académica, Rómulo Morales

Rómulo Martín Morales Hervias

El artículo propone una reforma del plan de estudios de la Facultad de Derecho de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Se parte de la tesis que el Derecho Civil es la base de todas las demás ramas del Derecho y por lo tanto se debe dar un mayor énfasis a las materias del Derecho Civil.