Survey on Content of Consumer Law Classes

Last Friday, at Richard Alderman's excellent Teaching Consumer Law Conference, under the auspices of the University of Houston Law Center--the conference where, two years ago, this Blog was born--I distributed a survey inquiring about what topics professors teach in their consumer law classes.  I announced some of the results at the conference and I have since received other survey responses.  The responses are interesting and potentially useful to at least those teaching the subject, but they would be even more useful if we had more of them.  Accordingly, before I post anything about the results, I wanted to urge anyone who has not already given me their response and who teaches consumer law to email me their survey response, at sovernj@stjohns.edu.  The survey is pasted in below.  If you like, you can copy and paste it into an email, indicating your responses.  It takes only a moment to complete.

CONSUMER PROTECTION COURSE COVERAGE QUESTIONNAIRE

If you have recently taught Consumer Protection or plan to teach it in the near future and know what you plan to cover, please answer this survey for the “Hot Topics” panel.

I teach __ a survey course  ___ seminar  ___ clinic  ___ other (specify: ____________) (if you teach more than one of these, please fill out a separate survey form for each course).

My course meets for ___ hours per week.

I cover the following topics (please check all that apply and add any additional topics in the space to the right):

Common law fraud ___

FTC Act ___

UDAP statutes ___

Constitutionality of regulating commercial speech ___

Truth in Lending Act ___

Consumer Leasing Act ___

Rent to Own ___

Bait and switch ___

Referral sales and pyramid schemes ___

Cooling off period rules and door to door sales ___

Fair Credit Reporting Act ___

Equal Credit Opportunity Act ___

Telemarketing ___

Spam ___

Gramm-Leach-Bliley privacy issues ___

Online privacy ___

Electronic Funds Transfers Act ___

Fair Debt Collection Practices Act ___

Fair Credit Billing Act ___

Consumer warranty issues ___

Magnuson-Moss ___

Holder in due course ___

Usury ___

Home Ownership and Equity Protection Act (HOEPA) ___

State predatory lending statutes ___

Preemption of state predatory lending statutes ___

Credit insurance ___

Payday lending ___

Subprime meltdown ___

Enforcement ___

Mandatory arbitration clauses ___

Unconscionability ___

Comments

[Jeff Sovern]

Personally, I regard those as more in the nature of investments than consumer transactions. The list is underinclusive in several other respects though. That's because I wanted to keep it to one side of a page to keep it short and easy to fill out. But I did invite respondents to add anything they covered that was omitted.

[michael webster]

Interesting list.

I note that although business opportunity frauds/franchise frauds are pitched by the FTC as worthy of consumer protection schemes, you have left them off your list entirely.