by Deepak Gupta
We're previously mentioned AT&T v. Concepcion, a case in which the U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether class-action bans in consumer and employment contracts may be held unconscionable, and hence unenforceable, under generally applicable state contract law. Because they have embedded these class-action bans in their standard arbitration agreements, corporate defendants have repeatedly argued that such state-law rulings are preempted by the Federal Arbitration Act of 1925. The lower courts, both state and federal, have uniformly rejected that preemption argument. Public Citizen Litigation Group represents the respondents, Vincent and Liza Concepcion, the California consumers who seek to bring a consumer fraud class action against AT&T.
Yesterday, AT&T filed its opening brief. Read it here.
When the amicus briefs supporting AT&T are filed next week, we'll post them here as well.
The Wall Street Journal explains here that after the new Credit Card Act became effective last February, credit card companies were barred from making profits in certain ways. For instance, the Act generally bans "universal default" -- that is, credit card companies cannot
raise rates on one credit card account (or all of a consumer's other
accounts) just because the consumer was late or missed a payment on another, separate account.
So, the companies are turning to other ways to make money, some of which are perfectly legal, such as raising annual fees, and some that may "skirt[] the new rules." This raises the question whether the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau established by the Dodd-Frank legislation will go beyond the Credit Card Act and seek to bar some credit card company practices as unfair and/or deceptive.
Antibiotics are regularly used in animal feed to fatten-up animals quickly, lowering producer's costs and increasing profits. But, according to this article in the Des Moines Register, "[d]octors and public health experts have long worried that there's a
human price to using drugs this way": that the prevalence of antibiotics in animals, which ends up in food ingested by humans, is creating antibiotic-resistant bacteria
that threaten human health. So, the Food and Drug Administration has issued a draft Guidance, entitled "The Judicious Use of Medically Important Antimicrobial Drugs in Food-Producing Animals," which proposes to "limit[] medically important antimicrobial drugs to uses in food-producing animals that are considered necessary for assuring animal health." As the Des Moines Register article explains, an earlier ban in Denmark seems to have had the desired effect:
Denmark . . . banned the growth-promotion use of antibiotics in the mid-1990s, cutting use of the drugs by 40 percent. More important, there's evidence that the ban reduced the amount of dangerous drug-resistant bacteria to which Danish consumers were being exposed. One type of bacteria found in hogs, campylobacter, is far less likely now to withstand a group of drugs known as macrolides than it was before the ban. Less than 20 percent of the bacteria was drug-resistant in 2006.
FDA's Principal Deputy Commissioner Josh Sharstein explained the FDA's view in his July 14, 2010 testimony to the Subcommittee on Health of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.