Sociological Perspectives

Debbie Does Damages: the Stormy Daniels Contract Clusterf*ck

03/08/18

There's been a lot of poorly informed reporting about the Stormy Daniels contract litigation, including in some quite reputable publications, but by reporters who just aren't well versed in legal issues.  For example, I've seen repeated reference to an "arbitration judge" (no such creature exists!) or to a "restraining order" (there's no enforceable order around as far as I can tell.

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People’s Pre-Bankruptcy Struggles -- New Paper from the Consumer Bankruptcy Project

02/20/18

The current Consumer Bankruptcy Project (CBP)’s co-investigators (myself, Slipster Bob Lawless, and past Slipsters Katie Porter & Debb Thorne) just posted to SSRN our new article (forthcoming in Notre Dame Law Review), Life in the Sweatbox.

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The Bootstrap Trap

02/07/18

I just had the pleasure of reading Duke Law Professor Sara Sternberg Greene's paper The Bootstrap Trap.  I highly recommend it for anyone who is interested in the intersection of consumer credit and poverty law.

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Whitford on Law School Financial Aid

11/16/17

WhitfordAlthough technically

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More on Personal Debt and Multilevel Marketing Companies

08/08/17

Last year, I posted about John Oliver's segment on Last Week Tonight dissecting multilevel marketing (MLM) companies (aka pyramid schemes), and proposed a link between personal debt, bankruptcy, and MLM companies.

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New Museum of Failure

04/26/17

A new Museum of Failure in Sweden stands as a tribute to the notion that failure is just an opportunity for learning, powering growth and future innovation. I thought no group could appreciate that as much as Credit Slips readers. Europe is still in the process of shaking off its ages old stigma with respect to failure, especially in the context of individual entrepreneurialism.

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New Article from the Consumer Bankruptcy Project: Attorneys’ Fees and Chapter Choice

03/06/17

Many of us on Credit Slips have been part of the Consumer Bankruptcy Project (CBP), a long-term research project studying people who file chapter 7 and 13 bankruptcy. Several years ago, some of us blogged about the writings from the last CBP iteration in 2007.  In 2013, the CBP was relaunched as an ongoing data collection effort.

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Scarcity, Money, and Undocumented Immigrants

01/16/17

Scarcity refers to having less than one needs -- time, money, calories when on a diet. For example, not having enough money reduces a person's cognitive capacity as much as missing one full night of sleep.

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