Employment Discrimination Against the Jobless

Apparently, some employers seeking workers advertise that jobless people need not apply. President Obama's proposed jobs legislation would make it illegal for an employer with 15 or more employees not to hire someone on the ground that he or she is unemployed, and it gives the spurned job applicant a right to sue when the employer violates the law. Read about it here.

Art of Living's Lawyers Brag About Stalking and Identifying Their Clients' Critics Without Notice

by Paul Alan Levy

Earlier this month I blogged about the legal issues raised by a subpoena used by a religious cult, Art of Living, relying on a marginal copyright claim as a basis for identifying one of its former members.  In the course of moving for summary judgment, the Doe has called attention to a perhaps incautious statement on the web site of the cult's lawyers, seeking clients by assuring them that, "Unlike most traditional firms, we relish the challenge of stalking, identifying and bringing Internet actors to justice - often before they even know we're onto them." 

Apparently, their business model depends on evading the notice aspect of the Dendrite test.  Do these lawyers  have so little confidence in the strength of their claims that they can't afford judicial scrutiny in an adversarial posture?  When I was first litigating Dendrite issues, plaintiffs' counsel loved to make provocative statements of this sort while trolling for clients.  More recently, such lawyers have been much more cautious; we can be grateful to the Kronenberger firm for their candor.

Obama Administration Decides Against En Banc Review on Constitutionality of Health Care Mandate

As noted here, the Obama Administration has decided not to seek en banc review of the Eleventh Circuit's 2-to-1 ruling that passage of the Affordable Care Act's health insurance mandate went beyond Congress's Commerce Clause power. That makes it more likely that the Supreme Court will hear the case (or one from another circuit) this Term and that the Court will issue a ruling during the heat of the presidential election campaign.

Citibank CEO Vikram Pandit Says Banks Should Explain Credit Products in "Plain Language"

Here. An excerpt:

I believe that all financial institutions should be required to disclose, in plain language, the essential facts about their products, especially credit offerings. The disclosures currently required by law theoretically tell the customer all he needs to know—provided, of course, that he can get through the fine print. But the information can be complex, confusing and hard to access.

For instance, consumers tend to assume that a credit card with the lowest annual percentage rate is best, but that’s not always true. At Citi we offer a product called the Simplicity Card. Customers are not charged annual fees or late fees and are not assessed penalty rate hikes. The interest rate is higher than the rate for many other cards. But for a customer used to being charged those fees, the actual cost of using the card is lower.

Yet we can’t make that crystal clear because other card issuers are not required to disclose the total potential cost of credit for their products. Hence consumers can’t make direct comparisons. They should be able to—which means that issuers should be required to disclose the full cost of credit for their products, which includes late fees and interest increases, in one clear sum.

Third, we need stronger product regulation to protect consumers against behavioral arbitrage. This is one instance where market mechanisms are inadequate to protect consumers’ interests.

What happens is often similar to the card example I just cited. When buying a car, for instance, a consumer is likely to choose the financing plan with the lowest up-front cost. Yet once every other cost and fee is factored in, the car with the lower monthly payment is often more expensive than the one parked next to it with the higher monthly payment. Think of the pre-crisis explosion of ARMs, Option ARMs, no-down payment loans and the like—they looked cheap but turned out to be very expensive.

Other countries have addressed this problem by setting loan-to-value ratios for mortgages. These countries have clearly decided that it’s not enough to leave things at caveat emptor. Some of the real-life patterns we see in consumer behavior lead to decisions that harm individuals’ balance sheets and threaten systemic safety. As we learned from the credit crisis and housing bubble, bad individual consumer decisions are not necessarily isolated events that hurt only the decision makers. In the aggregate, they can threaten the prosperity of the entire global economy. The point of rules against behavioral arbitrage is less to protect individuals from their own poor decisions than it is to protect the rest of us.

And here's what he says about credit scores:

We in the U.S. have historically relied on credit scores—an imperfect and backward-looking measurement that focuses on past borrowing. But many Asian countries have gone to a forward-looking approach. Credit bureaus and regulators have jointly created databases and regulations that foster information sharing on both sides of borrowers’ balance sheets and their income statements. Lenders then scrutinize this data to make informed assessments of creditworthiness and the affordability of debt.

 

Should President Obama Run Away From Class Warfare?

That's the question posed here by Sally Kohn, and her answer is no. She says that class warfare began at least as early as 1971 with the famed Powell Memorandum, it's being waged by the rich on the middle class (and, presumably, the poor as well),and it's a battle that President Obama should fight openly and that he (and the non-rich) must win.

For-Profit Colleges and the Military

In this NY Times article, Holly Petraeus, the head of servicemember affairs at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, explains how for-profit colleges prey on members of the military and their families. She begins the article this way:

Military personnel and their families are finding themselves under siege from for-profit colleges. A number of these schools focus on members of the armed forces with aggressive and often misleading marketing, and then provide little academic, administrative or counseling support once the students are enrolled.

Take a look at this Frontline piece on the same phenomenon.

Elizabeth Warren on "Class Warfare" and Taxing the Rich

Sounds like a formidable candidate here:

 

CFPB Expected to Propose New Mortgage Rules Next Year

Here.  The rules would change the Truth in Lending disclosure forms and implement the Dodd-
Frank provisions barring mortgage loans consumers can't repay.

Arthur Alan Wolk Gets Overlawyered to Take Down Its Criticisms

by Paul Alan Levy

Over the past couple of months, I have blogged (here and here) about Arthur Alan Wolk’s campaign of intimidation against anybody and everybody who reported in unfavorable terms about his litigation against Walter Olson, Ted Frank and Overlawyered for having criticized his handling of a piece of litigation.  The result was an new barrage of blogging about Wolk, bringing the Streisand effect to bear with a vengeance.

Wolk responded by threatening to sue me, as well as Techdirt and Scott Greenfield over their comments; he actually did sue me for about a week, although he dropped that action while muttering about how he was going to sue me later.  But with Techdirt, Greenfield and me, Wolk encountered a new phenomenon — bloggers who refused to cower before his threats, and even invited him to file suit if he thought he had a valid claim.  He has not done so, and I am confident that his bullying in that regard is at an end.  Note to other bloggers tempted to comment on Wolk: coraggio!

Wolk recently settled his lawsuits against Reason Magazine and against the Overlawyered defendants, and yesterday the defendants announced that settlement.  Reason posted a statement defiantly promising to keep its previous posts about Wolk online, but turning off the comment feature for the claimed purpose of protecting readers against being sued for what they might say in response.   Overlawyered went a bit further.

Interesting Article on Impact of AT&T v. Concepcion

Earlier this week, Bob Sullivan posted an interesting article about the impact of AT&T v. Concepcion. The article includes some specific examples of consumers whose cases were derailed by the Court's decision. The article is available here.