News Topic: Consumer Contracts

Why does the world hate lawyers?  Because of stuff like this .  You can't make this up:  the on-line menu prices for a Chinese restaurant weren't up-to-date, and a customer was overcharged $4. I get being pissed about that.  But what would most ... Read full article

Over the last couple years, The Pew Charitable Trusts has put together a useful series of reports regarding payday lending in the United States. The fourth installment was released on October 2. ... Read full article

Yesterday the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, along with 13 state attorneys general (including from my new home state of Indiana), announced a $92 million settlement and issued an enforcement action against Colfax Capital Corporation and Cul ... Read full article

Note from Katie Porter: This guest post is from Jennifer Song, senior staff attorney at the California Monitor Program. Jennifer pitched in and attended this workshop, and I hope Credit Slips readers will enjoy hearing about her experiences in a short ... Read full article

In light of G eneral Mills policy of claiming that its binding mandatory arbitration requirement (with class action waiver) applies to anyone who purchases its products, including via third-party vendors, I have decided, to post the following legal ... Read full article

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The  Consumerist  posted a story about a man who purchased prepaid debit cards from Walmart only to discover that the debit cards in the package were not Vanilla MasterCards as labeled but instead gift cards from other stores that had virtually no stored ... Read full article

Lauren blogged  about a new article by Omri Ben-Shahar , who has written a number of interesting and often (deliberately) provocative articles about consumer contracts. This new article certainly fits in that vein. ... Read full article

As the CFPB gears up to regulate arbitration clauses, a timely article by Omri Ben-Shahar has been posted on ssrn. ... Read full article

"Make ... Read full article

Hot of the presses that the EOUST has (again) suspended its "required" debtor audits due to budgetary constraints.  Initially they were supposed to do 1 in every 250, and that number fell in recent years to one in every 1,500 or so due to ... Read full article

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It’s National Consumer Protection Week (NCPW)!   Federal, state, local, and nonprofit consumer protection agencies and organizations are making extra efforts to promote consumer awareness .  First I have to get out of my system thoughts of Tom Lehrer’s ... Read full article

Now that my last few posts have bludgeoned consumer financial education and at least bloodied disclosure, and given that my suggestion of comprehension requirements is completely untested as a means of consumer protection for financial products, what ... Read full article

What if, instead of making the consumer smarter or the disclosures more comprehensible, as discussed in my last several posts, we made financial product disclosures smarter? ... Read full article

Given the limitations of Disclosure 2.0 and Disclosure 2.5 I described in my last posts, what is to be done? To answer this question, we might first ask what financial product disclosure is attempting to achieve. Although disclosure has several aims, one ... Read full article

February 27 is a big day for people interested in financial markets, consumer credit, and... well, many things of interest to Credit Slips readers. I'll be in New York, attending round two of the Second Circuit oral arguments in NML v. Argentina . ... Read full article

If, as I suggested in my last post, making the consumer smarter is hopeless, at least for those of us whose prenatal and early childhood environments can no longer be altered, what about disclosure?  Could point-of-sale disclosure equip consumers to make ... Read full article