Consumer Protection Law Commons^™

Mutual Fund Fees, Stewart L. Brown

William & Mary Business Law Review

Investors pay billions annually in fees for actively managed mutual funds, despite the availability of far superior, cost-effective alternatives like index funds. Mutual funds, with their unique legal structure, insulate management fees from competitive pressures, thereby enabling fund sponsors to maintain high fees. Contrary to the assumption that legal, regulatory, and governance mechanisms adequately protect investors, this Article demonstrates that such safeguards are largely ineffective. The competitive forces that would ordinarily drive fee reductions are rendered impotent by structural conflicts of interest, ineffective regulatory oversight, and the passive role of independent directors. Fund sponsors capitalize on economies of scale, reaping …

Unfit For Human Consumption: A Bone To Pick With Boneless Wings, H. Beau Baez

Akron Law Review

This article examines defective food laws after the Ohio Supreme Court held that “boneless” in boneless chicken wings does not mean “without bones.” The result in this case is a man with permanent injuries was precluded from recovering damages after eating a menu item described as “boneless.”

The article begins by discussing the case, Berkheimer v. REKM, and the rationale used by the court for allowing summary judgment against the plaintiff.  Next, the article examines legal history, beginning with 13^th century unwholesome food statutes.  This section demonstrates that the law for unwholesome food, until the 20^th century, …

Rules Of The Game: Lessons From Sports To Understand Antitrust Law’S Fairness Foundations, Tara Pincock, Daniel A. Hanley

Washington and Lee Law Review Online

Traditionally, courts and practitioners assert that the antitrust laws are simply about protecting competition, not competitors. In essence, these parties perceive competition to be inherently desirable, rather than recognizing that it can be beneficial or harmful depending on its intensity and scope. As a result of this mistaken belief, courts hold that certain conduct is legal under the antitrust laws simply because they determine it to be procompetitive, while conduct deemed anticompetitive is condemned. Courts seldom provide definitive boundaries to this pro-competition trope and instead assert it as if it were a well-established truism and universal societal good.

Without details …

Read But Not Understood? An Empirical Analysis Of Consumer Comprehension In Homeowners Insurance, Daniel Benjamin Schwarcz, Brenda Cude, Kyle D. Logue, German Marquez Alcala

Articles

Modern contract law assumes that consumers meaningfully assent to the standard forms that govern their daily lives. However, this assumption is widely regarded as a legal fiction for two key reasons: first, most consumers do not read standard forms, and second, even those who do often struggle to fully comprehend their terms and implications. Although the lack of consumer reading has been well documented through empirical research, consumers’ ability to comprehend standard-form contracts has received surprisingly little attention.

This Article addresses the latter issue by empirically examining whether providing excerpts from the dominant standard-form homeowners insurance policy improves consumer understanding …

Beyond Digital Pessimism: How A Focus On Trust Can Enhance Eu Digital Law, Neil Richards, Woodrow Hartzog, Claire Boine, Lea Despotis

Faculty Scholarship

Lawmakers looking to foster technological innovation on the European market are adopting laws they hope will promote consumer trust in digital products. Their strategy can be broken down into three components. First, they aim to empower consumers to choose how much data they want to share with companies through an express consent framework. Second, they seek to avoid harms from digital products through product safety law such as adapting the Product Safety Regulation to digital products or adopting the AI Act. Third, they endeavor to prevent manipulation of consumers through digital means.

In this essay, we argue that while laudable, …

Ai Is Coming For Your Mind: A Case For Consumer Protection, Blithe Ellis

Gateway Reader- Individual Papers

• The Problem: Immersive and anthropomorphic artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots can trigger, amplify, or reshape psychotic experiences—colloquially termed "AI psychosis"—by mirroring user language, validating delusional beliefs, and prioritizing user engagement over safety.

• The Method: The author analyzes peer-reviewed psychiatric literature, media reports from 2025, and user discussions on the r/ChatGPT Reddit forum to advocate for consumer protection regulations.

• Quantitative Finding: The analysis incorporates data from the year 2026, references cases involving a 26-year-old woman, and evaluates a specific Reddit thread featuring hundreds of user stories regarding AI-fueled delusions.

• Qualitative Finding: Shared themes in AI-associated distress include messianic missions, delusions of chatbot …

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Reclaiming Homeowner Wealth: A Conversation With Barry, Fried, And Hatfield, Prentiss Cox

Articles

Homeowners in the United States pay residential real estate brokers commission rates that are about twice as high as the commission charges by brokers in comparable countries. Given the enormous size of the residential home sale market—both in aggregate terms and as a percentage of wealth owned by the average homeowner—this cost discrepancy results in U.S. homeowners transferring tens of billions of dollars each year to brokers that would be saved in a more competitive and fair market. In Et Tu, Agent? Commission-Based Steering in Residential Real Estate (“Et Tu?”), Jordan M. Barry, Will Fried, and John William Hatfield provide …

Table Of Contents, Loyola Consumer Law Review

Loyola Consumer Law Review

No abstract provided.

Catch 23: Putting Superior Back Into The Superiority Prong Of Rule 23(B)(3), Fred B. Burnside

Loyola Consumer Law Review

No abstract provided.

Subversion By Design, Daniel Nicastro

Loyola Consumer Law Review

Dark patterns, in the words of the design expert who coined the term, are ".. . tricks used in websites and apps that make you do things that you didn't mean to, like buying or signing up for something."¹ The FTC, in its 2022 Staff Report on the subject, defined them similarly as ". . . design practices that trick or manipulate users into making choices they would not otherwise have made and that may cause harm."² Endemic to the digital retail space, dark patterns subvert consumer decision making, resulting in inflated spending, widespread privacy violations, and the …

The Ftc's First Action Under The Inform Consumers Act: A New Era Of Enforcement?, Karli Hiltner

Loyola Consumer Law Review

No abstract provided.

Preemption Without Protection: Reconsidering The Airline Deregulation Act In An Era Of Federal Retreat, Carmela Frontzak

Loyola Consumer Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Limits Of Privacy Protection: Why Ai Chatbots Demand Coppa Changes, Jacob Yeskis

Loyola Consumer Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Apathy Economy: Patents, Advertising, And Consumer Indifference, Gavin Milczarek-Desai, Derek E. Bambauer

UF Law Faculty Publications

Patents function as signals as well as rights to exclude. They inform competitors, investors, employees, and consumers about the invention and its owner. How this information affects consumers is not well understood. Existing studies disagree about how advertising a product or service as patented, or patent pending, affects the price consumers will pay. This Article offers the first major empirical study of that question and finds that consumers behave with surprising rationality: they will not pay any price premium for a patented product. A product’s patent status conveys little information about whether it is superior to competing offerings. The results …

Enforcing International Humanitarian Law Through The Business Responsibility To Respect Human Rights, Tara Van Ho

Faculty Articles

Insulation produced by the Danish company Rockwool—or its Russian subsidiary—lines thirty-one Russian Navy warships. Though not a weapon, this material is essential to the vessels’ operation. Did Rockwool have a responsibility under international law to stop the transfer of the insulation to the Russian Navy before Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine? This article examines the business responsibilities under the 2011 United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (“UNGPs”). In doing so, the article finds that the business responsibility to respect human rights in the UNGPs provides a strong mechanism for enforcing international humanitarian law (“IHL”). However, it requires …

Reevaluating Consumer Debt Enforcement: Why We Don’T Need Courts To Enforce Consumer Debt Contracts, Adam Toobin

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law

Enforcing consumer debt contracts against low- and middle-income borrowers, rather than making consumer debt markets work better, is inefficient and exacerbates consumer protection concerns. While consumer debt litigation—and enforcement of consumer debt contracts through wage and bank account garnishment—may have once strengthened nascent consumer debt markets, consumer credit scoring now effectively structures consumers’ incentives to repay their debt obligations. Debt enforcement is not necessary to encourage consumers to repay their debts and tends to drive borrowers into bankruptcy. Debt enforcement also undermines efforts to provide consumer protection in these markets by raising the stakes of any debt contract—where any default …

Insider Trading In Crypto Assets—Back To First Principles?, Katja Langenbucher

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law

This Essay examines whether the traditional rationales for prohibiting insider trading, which were developed for securities markets that facilitate capital formation, translate meaningfully to the emerging regulatory landscape for crypto assets. It contrasts the U.S. duty-based regime, grounded in fraud and fiduciary or confidential relationships under Rule 10b-5, with the EU’s information-based approach under the Market Abuse Regulation, which links trading prohibitions to mandatory disclosure of inside information. The former has proven underinclusive—prompting prosecutors to rely on wire fraud in recent crypto cases such as Wahi and Chastain while the latter tends toward overinclusivity. 

Turning to the newly emerging regimes …

Antitrust And Tech Giants: Learning From United States V. Google Llc, Marcus D’Agostino

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law

This Note addresses the evolution of antitrust regulation and enforcement in the United States, with a focus on the recent case of United States v. Google LLC. That case is used to frame the broader problem of insufficient remedies being implemented against large technology firms. The mild remedies granted to the government in Google reinforce the findings of the 2020 Congressional Report on Digital Competition. The Report recommended changes to the antitrust laws that would revive structural separation as a remedy. This Note argues that the body of evidence presented compels structural separation to be used more frequently as the …

A Golden Age For Us . . . Or For The Airlines? Ensuring Robust Federal Consumer Protections To Make Flying Great Again For Everyone, David S. Nahmias, Julian Sanghvi

Journal of Law and Mobility

Flying today is not meaningfully better for passengers than it was twenty years ago—and the airlines are largely to blame. Airlines leverage opaque pricing practices and junk fees to extract greater revenue from passengers, while the quality of air travel has deteriorated. Despite its mandate to protect the flying public and the air travel market from deceptive and anticompetitive practices, the Department of Transportation has been largely captured—adopting industry-favorable regulations and procedures while cutting commonsense consumer protections. This Essay examines the airlines’ coordinated campaign to circumvent and dismantle consumer protections, and how the industry have largely captured the federal agency …

“Spinning Wheel Got To Go Round”: Developments In The Law Affecting Electronic Payments And Financial Services, Sarah Jane Hughes, Tom Kierner, Stephen T. Middlebrook

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The past year reminds us of the rock lyrics from “Spinning Wheel” on Blood, Sweat & Tears’s 1968 self-titled record—“What goes up, must come down/Spinning Wheel got to go round”—because there have been many changes in strategy and reversal of policy since President Trump’s inauguration in January 2025. Our Survey documents these changes and reversals as they affect electronic payments and financial services. This year’s Survey also reports on warnings from state and federal regulators aimed at bank and non-bank providers of consumer financial services. Part II examines an FTC enforcement action related to the unfair and deceptive marketing of …