CL&P Roundup

by Deepak Gupta

It's been a while since I did a CL&P roundup, but that doesn't mean there hasn't been lots of interesting consumer law-related discussion around the blogosphere.  Here are a few recent items that caught my interest:

• A Payday Lender's Sales Pitch:  Over at Credit Slips, consumer law professor Bob Lawless blogs about his students' experiences serving as mock legislators facing the problem of payday lending.  The students decided to do some field research about how payday lenders in Illinois market their products and skirt current law.  Fascinating stuff.

• CAFA's Second Anniversary, Listen in on the Federalist Society:   Yesterday, the Federalists had a lunch to talk about the Class Action Fairness Act, with John Beisner and plaintiffs' lawyers Michael Hausfeld and John Stoia.  You can listen to an MP3 sound file of the discussion at this link.   

• Cy Pres and Kickbacks:  Ted Frank of the conservative anti-litigation blog Point of Law posts on some problems with the use of cy pres awards.   

• Patients as Consumers?:  The Reasonable Basis blog reports on an interesting new decision by the Kansas Supreme Court holding that the state's Consumer Protection Act covers a physician's professional conduct in providing treatment.

• Harvard Law & Policy Review, not to be confused with the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy:  This isn't exactly fresh news, but still worth mentioning.  The American Consitution Society has finally launched its progressive law & policy journal as a counterpoint to the very similarly-named conservative journal.   I'm not sure what to think.  On the one hand, I think it's sad that we've gotten to the point that we can't carry on our discourse in a single forum, but on the other hand this journal looks really promising.  Here's a post by Elizabeth Warren discussing the journal's focus on middle-class economic issues.