Matt Bruckner article on the roles of the states in protecting student loan borrowers from misbehaving schools

Matthew A. Bruckner of Howard has written The Forgotten Stewards of Higher Education Quality, 11 U.C. Irvine L. Rev. 1 - 41 (2020). Here's the abstract:

A “triad” of regulators is supposed to ensure that student loan borrowers are not harmed by low-value institutions of higher education, including exploitative profiteers operating fly-by-night or predatory institutions of higher education. The triad has failed. Millions of students have borrowed billions of federal student loan dollars that they won’t ever repay, causing borrowers to suffer needless economic harm and psychological anguish. But these harms were, are, and remain mostly preventable. This Article appears to be the first law review article to consider the states’ role in policing institutional quality and ensuring that student borrowers are not preyed upon by low-value institutions of higher education. It suggests concrete steps states could take, such as adopting a state version of financial responsibility scores, the gainful employment rule, or a cohort default rate metric, to avoid being characterized as the forgotten stewards of higher education quality.

Virginia Search Warrant Seeking to Identify Peaceful Protestors

by Paul Alan Levy

Yesterday, we filed a motion to quash a search warrant seeking to obtain from Facebook the confidential files of an activist group that has been protesting the refusal of Virginia authorities to step in to protect the health of immigration detainees in a private prison in Farmville, Virginia.  The motion builds on successful work three years ago along with the ACLU in opposing the Trump Administration’s attempt to raid online files of a group that ran protests at his inauguration. The ACLU's argument back then was based on the Fourth Amendment, influenced by the First Amendment; our briefs were based entirely on the First Amendment right to speak anonymously.

Steiger Consumer Law Fellowships that pays law students $6,000 for summer work now accepting applications

Here's the announcement:

In its seventeenth year, the Janet D. Steiger Fellowship Project offers paid summer clerkships for law students to work on consumer protection issues in the offices of State Attorneys General across the country.

The Janet D. Steiger Fellowship Project provides law students the extraordinary opportunity to work in the consumer protection departments of state and territorial Offices of Attorneys General and other consumer protection agencies, including the National Association of Attorneys General and the Attorney General’s Office of the District of Columbia, throughout the United States. The eight to ten-week paid Fellowships were initiated in 2004 by the ABA Antitrust Law Section, in cooperation with the National Association of Attorneys General, as a consumer protection outreach initiative to introduce law students to the rewards of legal careers in public service. A total of 425 Steiger Fellowships have been awarded through the summer of 2020.

The law students who have served as Steiger Fellows have characterized their experiences as truly rewarding, often well beyond their expectations. A number of students have said that for the first time they are considering law careers in public service, and several have already entered public service upon graduation.

Each of the highly motivated Steiger Fellows provides tangible, meaningful assistance to states, territories and other consumer protection agencies that are in substantial need of additional resources to fulfill their consumer protection mission. Offices that have hosted Steiger Fellows in the past have characterized the Fellows’ work as exemplary and have often described the students as some of the most talented interns the offices have ever attracted.

The Council of the Section approved funding for states and other entities to participate in the 2021 Steiger Fellowship Project.  Each selected student will receive a $6,000 stipend (subject to certain federal taxes and administered through the offices of the various consumer protection agencies). This Project continues to be a tribute to the memory of the late Janet D. Steiger, one of America’s great public servants who, during her remarkable tenure as FTC Chairman, dramatically improved cooperation, communication and coordination between state and federal consumer protection and antitrust enforcement agencies.

The locations that will receive Steiger Fellows during the summer of 2021 are:

• ^Arizona | *Arkansas | %Colorado | *Connecticut | * Delaware | *District of Columbia |%Florida |*Georgia | ^Hawaii | %Illinois | %Indiana |%Iowa | *Kansas | %Maryland | %Massachusetts |%Minnesota | % Mississippi | % Montana | % National Association of Attorneys General | * Nebraska | *Nevada | %$ New Hampshire | %New Jersey |  %New York | *Pennsylvania | *~Puerto Rico | % Rhode Island | %South Dakota | *South Carolina | %Tennessee | *Texas | *Utah | ^Vermont | ^Virginia | ^Washington | ^West Virigina | %Wisconsin |  %#Wyoming
  
  Note:    ^8 Week Term of Service           %10 Week Term of Service        *No Term of Service Preference                ~ Fluency in Spanish Required         #1L Candidates Only $2L Candidates Only

Applications and more available here.

(H?T: Leslie Fair)

Instead of Liability Waivers, Reduce the Spread of Covid-19

by Jeff Sovern

My latest Bloomberg Law Insight piece. Excerpt:

No doubt the same people who want to free businesses of accountability for sickening people would oppose the outlawing of Covid-19 liability waivers as an infringement on liberty. But practically no one reads contracts—not even consumer law professors. And if consumers do read them, they probably can’t understand them. A study I co-authored found that few consumers grasped the meaning of a clause that took away their right to sue in court.

In short, the liberty involved is almost certainly only that of the companies, not the consumers.

Covid-19 cannot be blocked by a signature on a piece of paper. Congress should make sure that the same is true of responsibility for spreading it. Otherwise, we will have lots of legal documents but more people will die of the virus.

FDA warns companies to stop misleading consumers by promoting herbal products to treat Covid-19

The FDA has issued warning letters to two companies -- Griffo Botanicals and Prairie Dawn Herbs -- telling them to stop promoting non-FDA-approved herbal products "to mitigate, prevent, treat, diagnose, or cure COVID-19." 

These letters include this language:

FDA is advising consumers not to purchase or use certain products that have not been approved, cleared, or authorized by FDA and that are being misleadingly represented as safe and/or effective for the treatment or prevention of COVID-19. Your firm will be added to a published list on FDA’s website of firms and websites that have received warning letters from FDA concerning the sale or distribution of COVID-19 related products in violation of the FD&C Act. This list can be found at http://www.fda.gov/consumers/health-fraud-scams/fraudulent-coronavirus-disease-covid-19-products.

AC Transit Counsel Goes from Bad to Worse

by Paul  Alan Levy

Last week I explained the many fallacies in a contention by Jill Sprague, General Counsel of the Alameda-Contra Costa County Transit District, that Victoria Fierce, a candidate for election to the ACT Transit Board of Directors, has unlawfully posted photographs to her campaign web site that included busses and a route sign that included AC Transit’s official logo

In response, Sprague has backed off the claim that this was an improper use of the AC Transit logo. Desperate to save face, Sprague claimed in a letter lletter late last week  late last week that Fierce as making a deliberately deceptive use of the AC Transit seal, and hence committing a misdemeanor in violation of a provision in California’s Elections Code.

Well, no. Generally speaking, a seal is a round image containing pictorial elements see for example these compendiums of state seals and of city and county seals.  And until Sprague sent her letter, there is no reason to believe that AC Transit ever deemed its logo to be a “seal.” Thus, I have explained to Sprague in a letter today why she is wrong – not only is the logo not a seal, but there is no deception and the elections provision applies to mass mailings.

But Sprague also claimed in her letter to me that she has been telling other candidates that they had to stop using the logo . . . or is she threatening them with prosecution for using the seal? That's something I'd  like to find out.  It's bad enough that she had threatened Fierce, but if she is extending her reign of error to other candidates running against her employer’s incumbent leaders, serious action may be needed. I have demanded production of all the demand letters, and will report back.

UPDATE

AC Transit has dropped its demand, while suggesting that it has in mind to review the ordinance to be clearer about its intent.

Bay Area Transit District Attacks Candidate For Showing Its Logo

by Paul  Alan  Levy

Much like the case of Jeremy Whittaker a few years ago, a demand letter from the general counsel of an elective transit district in the East Bay seeks to interfere with the political campaign of a candidate seeking to replace the lawyer’s bosses. The Alameda-Contra Costa Transit District has threatened Victoria Fierce because her campaign web site violates an ordinance adopted by that municipal body because it contains photographs in which the AT Transit logo can be seen, and because the directors against whom she is running have not authorized her to carry such photos. The photos include two shots of an AC Transit bus and one shot of an AC Transit route sign (such as the image here, also displayed without authorization). 
So AC Transit demands that Fierce remove the photos and cease "any other unauthorized use.”

There is a twist on the silly demand letter that Whittaker received from Mesa's outside counsel – instead of expressly alleging trademark infringement, AC Transit relies on an ordinance that purports to make unauthorized use of the logo “unlawful.” Now, I am no expert on California municipal law, but I have not been able to identify any California statute that confers general police powers on a municipal transit district, so that it has any power to make it “unlawful” for a member of the public to display its logo. And even if the District had such powers, the First Amendment would not allow a government body to forbid truthful noncommercial speech that shows a municipal bus or route sign on which a logo is displayed.

Eleventh Circuit holds that class-action "service" or "incentive" awards for named plaintiffs are a no-no

Yesterday, in Johnson v. NPAS Solutions, the Eleventh Circuit held that so-called "incentive" or "service" awards to named class-action plaintiffs are unlawful. That is, in a class-action settlement, a named plaintiff may not be paid extra money (over and above money paid to all class members) as reimbursement/compensation for her efforts on behalf of the class or as an incentive to act as a representative plaintiff. Despite the near ubiquity of these awards in modern class-action practice, the court of appeals held that two Supreme Court decisions from the 1800's demanded this result. See Trustees v. Greenough, 105 U.S. 527 (1882), and Central Railroad & Banking Co. v. Pettus, 113 U.S. 116 (1885). The opinion addresses a couple other issues that arise frequently in class-action settlements. Worth reading.  

HT Mike Kirkpatrick

Timothy D. Lytton's Op-ed in The Conversation: Business liability shield is holding up another coronavirus bailout – . . . why immunity is unnecessary and even harmful

Here. Excerpt:

As I document in my 2019 book, “Outbreak: Foodborne Illness and the Struggle for Food Safety,” a handful of high-profile lawsuits against food companies have encouraged businesses at every link along the supply chain to improve their safety practices. That’s what happened after lawsuits against Jack in the Box over contaminated hamburgers in 1993 and Dole over E. coli in baby spinach in 2006.

Similarly, the prospect of liability for COVID-19 transmission is likely to encourage business owners to invest in cost-effective precautions, follow the advice of public health authorities, adopt industry safety standards and use common sense.

Why is Ridgeback Biotherapeutics Trying to Suppress Adverse Opinions by Issuing Frivolous Defamation Threats?

Over the past several months, I have posted a number of articles about the campaign of intimidating copyright demand letters from Mathew Higbee, who tries to extract money from individuals, nonprofits and small businesses by threatening to file frivolous copyright lawsuits. This is the first in what I expect will be series of articles about a different sort of campaign of frivolous threats: companies that try to clean up their reputations by hiring lawyers to send frivolous threats of libel litigation.  I'm not sure which is worse.

Today’s story begins with an article that ran in the Washington Post back in June, 2020, focusing on the role played by a small Miami-based pharmaceutical corporation, run by hedge fund managers and called Ridgeback Biopharmaceutics. The Post noted that Ridgeback had invested in a potential antiviral therapy, developed at Emory University with public financing, but that, when it failed to secure federal financing to develop the drug further, it made a killing by selling its rights to Merck. These facts, the reporter suggested, illustrate “the perception that companies are profiteering during a global medical crisis — especially in cases where inventions were funded by taxpayers.” The article also tied the situation to the revelations from BARDA whistleblower Rick Bright, who cited this as one of the examples of political pressure being applied to secure federal financing for private profit.

Congress Should Outlaw Contract Clauses Waiving Liability for Negligently Exposing People to COVID

by Jeff Sovern

That's the title of my post over at the ContractsProf Blog virtual symposium on contracts and COVID. Here's an excerpt: 

The argument behind liability waivers as to normal risks is that people should be able to arrange their private affairs as they wish, but COVID liability waivers are not purely private.  Virus liability waivers are very different from, say, a ski resort’s form disclaiming liability for negligently causing a skier a broken leg. A skier on crutches will not cause others to break their bones. When a business fails to take adequate precautions against infecting its customers with COVID, it increases the likelihood that not only the consumer but also others with whom the consumer comes into contact will be afflicted by the virus. Even if the consumer knowingly signed a waiver form—a dubious proposition that I discuss below--those others did not. Liability disclaimers that protect people in private contractual relationships in which others do not have an interest are a far cry from COVID liability waivers.

I look forward to the forthcoming posts from other contributors to the virtual symposium.

Chris Odinet Article: Predatory Fintech and the Politics of Banking

Christopher K. Odinet of Iowa has written Predatory Fintech and the Politics of Banking, Iowa Law Review (2021 Forthcoming). Here is the abstract:

With American families living on the financial edge and seeking out high cost loans even before COVID-19, the term financial technology or “fintech” has been used like an incantation aimed at remedying everything that’s wrong with America’s financial system. Scholars and supporters from both the public and private sector proclaim that innovations in financial technology will “bank the unbanked” and open new channels to affordable credit. This exuberance for all things tech in finance has led to a quiet yet aggressive deregulatory agenda, including, as of late, a federal assault via rulemaking on the ability of states to police the cost and privilege of extending credit within their borders. This deregulation and the ethos behind it have made space for growth in high cost, predatory lending that reaches across state lines via websites and smart phones and that is aggressively targeting cash-strapped families. These loans are made using a business model whereby funds are funneled through a group of lightly regulated banks in a way designed to take advantage of federal preemption. Fintech companies rent out and profit from the special legal status of these bank partners, which in turn keeps the bank’s involvement in the shadows. Stripping down fintech’s predatory practices and showing them for what they really are, this Article situates fintech in the context of this country’s longstanding dual banking wars, both between states and the federal government and between consumer advocates and banking regulators. And it points the way forward for scholars and regulators willing to shake off fintech’s hypnotic effect. This means, in the short term, using existing regulatory tools to curtail the dangerous lending identified here, including by taking a more expansive view of what it means for a bank to operate safely and soundly under the law. In the long term, it means having a more comprehensive and national discussion about how we regulate household credit in the digital age, specifically through the convening of a Twenty-First Century Commission on Consumer Finance. The Article explains how and why the time is ripe to do both. As the current pandemic wipes out wages and decimates savings, leaving desperate families turning to predatory fintech finance ever more, the need for reform has never been greater.

Tragic News About Georgetown Consumer Law Professor Anne Fleming

Anne died Tuesday night of an embolism. Those of us who knew Anne know what a loss this is.  Those who weren't lucky enough to have met her may know her through her work or may have seen her activities described on this blog here, here, and here. More about her here. Anne's death is a painful blow to the community of consumer law professors.

CFP on Racial Capitalism

We've received the following Call for Papers, which overlaps with consumer law issues:

Racial Capitalism:

An Elaboration in Legal Scholarship

As a journal dedicated to social, racial, and economic justice, the Journal of Civil Rights & Economic Development (JCRED) is soliciting articles for Racial Capitalism, an Elaboration in Legal Scholarship, our forthcoming symposium issue. This issue will explore the legal dimensions of our capitalist political economy and its systemically racist nature.  

We are in a moment which calls for a legal analysis that grapples with the reality of Racial Capitalism in our society. From the racially disparate harms of the COVID-19 pandemic to the calls from the Black Lives Matter Movement to #DefundPolice, the racialized nature of our capitalist political economy has become impossible to overlook.

To advance this conversation in legal scholarship, the Journal seeks to publish the work of scholars, practitioners, and advocates, who creatively and incisively explore the legal dimensions of Racial Capitalism and what lies beyond its horizon.

The deadline to submit an abstract for consideration is October 1st, 2020, with full length articles from selected authors to be due January 6th, 2021. Along with publication in this symposium issue, a handful of authors will be selected to each receive a $500 honorarium and participate in a virtual panel discussion on Racial Capitalism in the Spring. For additional details and instructions for submission, please visit https://www.jcred.org/news-and-events/racial-capitalism.

If you have any questions about this call for papers or the Journal, please contact the Research & Symposium Director, Jay Hedges, jay.hedges18@stjohns.edu.

Why "the FDA just had the worst day in its history."

LA Times columnist Michael Hiltzik explains why "the FDA just had the worst day in its history." Hiltzik says:

During a White House event Sunday, FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn stood by silently in the face of an unsupported attack on his agency from the worst threat to public health in the U.S. today, President Trump. The event was held to mark Hahn’s capitulation to a political directive from the Trump White House, in approving an emergency use authorization for the use of convalescent plasma to treat COVID-19 patients. In doing so, Hahn utterly misrepresented the findings of the Mayo Clinic trial of convalescent plasma treatment. Hahn, parroting Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, said the study demonstrated a 35% reduction of mortality from the transfusion of convalescent plasma. That’s a gross misrepresentation of its results. Nevertheless, an inaccurate description of the results was repeated in a tweet by the FDA’s official spokesperson, Emily Miller, a former correspondent for the far-right, conspiracy-mongering One America News Network, OANN.

 

New 9th circuit arbitration decision

Last Wednesday, the Ninth Circuit issued a 2-to-1 decision in Rittman v. Amazon, holding that Amazon "last-mile" delivery drivers are transportation workers engaged in interstate commerce under 9 U.S.C. § 1 and, therefore, are exempt from the Federal Arbitration Act's enforcement provisions. As law prof Adam Steinman explains here, Rittman follows a recent decision from the First Circuit, Waithaka v. Amazon.

States challenge FDIC rule that allows lenders to bypass state interest-rate caps

Eight state attorneys general today filed a lawsuit challenging a new Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation rule that creates a loophole allowing predatory lenders to evade state laws that forbid excessive interest-rate charges.

From the California attorney general's press release: "These caps on interest rates play a critical role in regulating payday loans and other high-cost lending throughout the state. Under existing federal law, federally insured state-chartered banks are exempt from state interest-rate caps. The FDIC’s final rule extends these exemptions to any non-bank lender that buys loans originated by an exempt bank. The final rule virtually invites predatory lenders to 'rent a bank' — use a federally insured bank — to do its dirty work of issuing loans with interest rates that exceed state law which the bank then transfers to the predatory lender. The complicit bank washes its hands of the usurious loan, the predatory lender escapes the reach of state laws prohibiting such loans, and consumers pay the price."

The complaint is here.

Choi & Spier on the economics of class action waivers

Albert H. Choi of Michigan and Kathryn E. Spier of Harvard have written The Economics of Class Action Waivers. Here is the abstract:

Many firms require consumers, employees, and suppliers to sign class action waivers as a condition of doing business with the firm, and three recent US Supreme Court cases, Concepcion, Italian Colors, and Epic Systems, have endorsed companies’ ability to block class actions through mandatory individual arbitration clauses. Are class action waivers serving the interests of society or are they facilitating socially harmful business practices? This paper synthesizes and extends the existing law and economics literature by analyzing the firms’ incentive to impose class action waivers. While in many settings the firms’ incentive to block class actions may be aligned with maximizing social welfare, in many other settings it is not. We examine conditions in which class action waivers can compromise product safety, facilitate anticompetitive conduct, and support harmful employment practices. Our analysis delivers a more nuanced, policy-based critique of the recent US Supreme Court cases, highlights several new unresolved issues, and identifies future challenges for legal scholarship.

Online Program: The Racial Wealth Gap: Lending, Credit, and Other Disparities

Cheryl Wade, author of Predatory Lending and The Destruction of the African American Dream, Sarah Ludwig, Executive Director, New Economy Project, and Cathi Kim, Director, Inclusiv/Capital will speak on Thursday, August 13 at 7 pm EDT. Attendance is free but registration is required. The registration link is at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScxTjViodwGaNG03Q1kEqD85DvhpkNxYbpp968QVzMD9mkrTQ/viewform.

Further pursuit of trolling by Higbee and Associates

by Paul Alan Levy

In past blog posts, I have discussed our efforts to persuade the copyright enforcement law firm headed by Mathew Higbee to concentrate its efforts to pursue copyright infringement claims on behalf of its photographer clients on cases where it has reasonable claims of infringement by actual Internet users who put up his clients’ photographs (and not against the hosts of interactive web sites where the claimed infringements were committed by third parties). I have also decried the firm’s tendency to demand excessive damages payments far above what could likely be recovered in litigation.  The Higbee firm plays on the legal ignorance of its targets as well as on the fact that, generally speaking, it costs more in legal fees to get sound advice, and to defend when defense is meritorious, than to simply pay the demanded ransom.

In several past cases, when the Higbee firm found that it would have to defend its claims against parties who could afford to defend themselves, it has dropped its claims rather than defending its demand letters. We have argued, as a result, that Higbee firm clients who had stood to profit from clearly unreasonable demand letter can be subjected to attorney fee awards when the target had to file a declaratory judgment action to silence the threats. One of the firm’s clients settled our attorney fees application for $10,000; our application for fees against two other Higbee clients is still pending.

In the course of discussing these fee applications, one tack taken by the Higbee firm to discourage us from pursuing attorney fees was to represent that it had taken to heart my criticism of their seeking damages, in the manner of Righthaven, from forum operators whose operators had failed to perfect their DMCA immunity by registering an agent for the receipt of DMCA takedown notices.  Because the requirement of "volition" before an alleged infringed can be held liable provides an alternate, although for less perfect, defense in such cases, the Higbee firm  claimed said that it was no longer pursuing claims against online hosts, based on their users’ alleged infringement. I suspected at the time that the claim about changed positions was false; and in the weeks after we received these assurances, several more hosts have reached out for help addressing Higbee firm demands over hosted photos or hosted deeplinks to photos. The lawsuit that we filed on Thursday against AdLife Communications and Marketing Co. is a case in point.

 

Neil Sobol's Survey of Law Schools Offering Consumer Law Courses

Guest post by Neil Sobol:

As part of an article in which I advocate for the incorporation of consumer law issues in first-year law classes, I requested my research assistant, Spencer Lockwood, to update the consumer law offerings chart reported in  Jeff Sovern's post in 2019. Spencer surveyed 201 ABA accredited law schools via their websites. He organized the data by category: (1) "consumer-related classes," which refers to courses that historically contain consumer law topics, (2) "consumer-specific classes," which refers to course offerings that have "consumer" in their names, and (3) two similarly named and defined consumer clinic categories.

He found that, in total, accredited law schools offer 705 consumer-related classes and 100 consumer-specific classes. In sum, about 48% of them offer at least one consumer-specific class. Moreover, about 10% of schools offer at least one consumer-specific clinic. Because it is likely that some course information is outdated on schools' websites, we request the assistance of the consumer law academy. Please send any corrections to nsobol@law.tamu.edu so that I can update the chart. Any input is greatly appreciated.

Download Neil Sobol Chart_Consumer Law Offerings-Aug 6 2020

 

 

The next coronavirus relief bill and tort deform

Law prof Daniel Hemel (@DanielJHemel) has posted a detailed series of tweets skewering the tort-deform provisions in the Republican-sponsored coronavirus relief bill. I recommend reading these tweets. Hemel begins with the statement that "[t]he liability provisions in McConnell’s 'HEALS Act' do not reflect a serious attempt to address problems with the tort system" and then goes on to demolish any justification for each provision. Go here to read Hemel's tweets.

I have a question. The readers of this blog will generally agree that the liability provisions in the Republican bill stink. But let's say there's a compromise bill that adopts all (or most) of the much more generous Covid relief measures that the House Democrats want but also includes the tort-deform proposals championed by the Republicans. The alternatives might be no bill at all (or no bill for quite a while) or a bill that has considerably less relief for people who desperately need it. Should the compromise bill be adopted?

MCConnell's Orwellian attempt to block a non-existent tidal wave of litigation by consumers against businesses by contributing to a tidal wave that does exist--of cases by businesses against consumers

by Jeff Sovern

Not only does McConnell's coronavirus bill make it much harder for consumers to sue businesses that carelessly infect them with the virus, it also makes it much easier for businesses to sue consumers suffering from COVID. Suppose a consumer sends a letter asking for help with medical bills to a business that infected her with the virus, and says she won't sue the business if she gets that help. If she wouldn't have been able to bring a valid case because she couldn't satisfy the draconian standards established by the bill, the business can sue the consumer for compensatory damages (would there be any?), collect attorney's fees, and in some cases punitive damages. The consumer would be liable even if she never sued, but only sent a letter. That's under section 164. That will certainly give businesses that cavalierly sicken consumers a weapon in case the consumers want to seek help from the companies that injured them. How Orwellian for Republicans to pretend to prevent a tidal wave of litigation that doesn't exist while contributing to another--suits by businesses against consumers--that does.

New study: Vaccines are "remarkably safe"

As the world races to find a safe and effective vaccine against COVID-19, note a study published today in the Annals of Internal Medicine. The study reviewed all vaccines approved by the Food & Drug Administration for the 20-year period ending December 31, 2015. The study's finding:

Over a 20-year period, vaccines were found to be remarkably safe. A large proportion of safety issues were identified through existing postmarketing surveillance programs and were of limited clinical significance. These findings confirm the robustness of the vaccine approval system and postmarketing surveillance.

Read the whole study here.

Online Event Open to All: Racism, Renting, and Redlining: A Conversation on Housing Discrimination & Its Impact on Economic Injustice

In solidarity with the protests that have initiated a national conversation on institutional racism, the St. John’s Law School Student Chapter of the National Association of Consumer Advocates is hosting a two-part online discussion on discrimination in the context of economic justice. Our first conversation will focus on the housing discrimination that continues to harm POC as it perpetuates structural inequality in education, financial services, and wealth-building. The conversation will include the following panelists:

• Fred Freiberg, Executive Director at the Fair Housing Justice Center

• Lisa Darden, Board Member and former undercover tester at the Fair Housing Justice Center; and

• Makedah K. Salmond, Esq., Supervising Attorney at the Tenants’ Rights Unit of NYLAG

Date: July 30th, 2020
Time: 7:00 pm
Co-sponsoring Organizations:
• Black Law Students Association
• Public Interest Center
• Dispute Resolution Society
• New York Real Property Law Journal
• Real Property Law Society
• Mattone Institute
• Coalition of Social Justice

Attendance is free but registration is required. Register at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSes7mRRGrhnAYsDaypgIyUkqGIfKr0RHGJ66J6xDimuTmhuIA/viewform