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 ___
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.
Posted by: Jeff Sovern | Tuesday, May 27, 2008 at 09:07 PM
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.
Posted by: michael webster | Tuesday, May 27, 2008 at 06:26 PM