Washington Post: "Maxed Out" Prescient About Mortgage Loan Market

Today's Washington Post explains in this short article that although the movie "Maxed Out," directed by James Scurlock (pictured to the left), received only a modest reception when it hit movie theaters in March, it was "right on the money" in depicting the country's debt crisis, as evidenced by recent troubles in the subprime loan market.  The CP&L blog has discussed "Maxed Out" on several occasions, including here and here.

The Problem of Undisclosed Conflicts in Arbitration

The New York Times has a story titled When Arbitrators Are Their Own Judges containing another anecdote about the perils of arbitration. In arbitration with his brokerage, a retiree discovered four days before his scheduled hearing that one member of the three-member panel had previously represented the  brokerage, as had other lawyers in his firm. Arbitrators are trusted to disclose conflicts of interests on their own initiative, but that does not always happen. 

NPR Talks With CPSC Chair

NPR has been airing some excellent coverage lately about the toys-from-China safety scandal.  This morning, the Diane Rehm Show had a panel of guests to discuss the issue, including Nancy Nord, the Acting Chair of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and U.S. PIRG's Ed Mierzwinski.   Nord also appeared for a story on NPR's Morning Edition.

Information on Recalled Lead-Paint-Tainted Toys

U.S. PIRG's consumer blog has collected this set of materials related to the massive recall of imported lead-paint-tainted toys.  PIRG's post includes information concerning the inability of the Consumer Product Safety Commission to protect us from dangerous products.  Check it out.

New SSRN Consumer Law Abstracts Journal

I am pleased to announce that Deepak and I are editing a consumer law abstracts journal for SSRN.  You can subscribe to the journal by visiting www.ssrn.com.  For those who are not familiar with SSRN, authors post articles, book chapters, and other writings on  the SSRN web site and the various subject matter journals publish abstracts of the articles to alert those interested in a particular field to the availability of the publications.  We encourage you to submit your work to SSRN for inclusion in the journal at http://hq.ssrn.com/. 

Arbitration Anecdote

Over at the excellent Credit Slips blog, Elizabeth Warren has an intriguing post titled "Arbitration First-Hand" about the efforts of an attorney in an arbitration to persuade the arbitrator to rule for his or her client when the creditor's attorney failed to show up or call in for the arbitration.

Protecting the Online Privacy of Children

Here is the abstract of an article on coordinating law and technology to protect the online privacy of children : 

At least two-thirds of children between the ages of 10
and 13 surf the Internet, MySpace has recorded more webpage views
than Ebay and Google combined, and the American Medical
Association has begun to advise parents about maintaining the
safety of their children online. The Internet brings rich content
to children and expands their horizons, but at the same time
creates dangers and risks to their privacy and well-being. In
2006, Xanga.com was fined $1 million by the Federal Trade
Commission for collecting information from children without
parental consent, in violation of the Children's Online Privacy
Protection Act (COPPA). The FTC has predicted since its COPPA
regulations in 2000 that technology would provide the answer to
protecting children online, yet no technology has emerged.
Clearly, Internet and communications technology have progressed
rapidly and significantly in over seven years, yet protection of
children's privacy seems to have been left behind. The authors
argue that it is possible, through the co-ordination of law and
technology, to facilitate a parent's protection of his or her
child in the online environment. The article briefly describes
POCKET (Parental Consent for Kids' Electronic Transactions), a
technology developed by the authors under a National Science
Foundation Cybertrust grant, to help protect children's privacy
online. The article concludes that the technology to protect
children that seemed so near when COPPA was initially adopted
should not be abandoned for less effective regulatory standards.

The article, titled "Pocket Protection," is by  France Belanger, Michael Hsiao, Jung-Min Park, all of Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, and is available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1000427

Is This a Deceptive Practice Aimed at Law Professors and Lawyers?

Over at Balkinization, my colleague, Brian Tamanaha, reports on a possible deceptive practice aimed at law professors and lawyers, in a post titled "Have You Received This 'Honor?'"  I did receive the "honor," along with quite a few of my colleagues.  We're wondering how widely this "honor" has been bestowed, which would bear on whether it truly is deceptive.

Brief Overview of US Consumer Protection Law and Institutions

Spencer Weber Waller and Jillian G. Brady, both of Loyola University of Chicago - School of Law, have co-authored  "Consumer Protection in the United States: An Overview," a chapter in a forthcoming international anthology on consumer protection law.  I suspect it would be of greatest value to those who are not already familiar with US consumer laws.  Here's the abstract:

This chapter, which will appear in a forthcoming international anthology on consumer protection law, is a broad overview of United States consumer protection law and enforcement. It focuses on the utterly decentralized nature of consumer protection law in the U.S. and the combined roles of federal, state, local, and private law in deterring, detecting, and punishing deceptive and unfair conduct that injures consumers. It further summarizes federal, state, local, and private litigation options to obtain damages, restitution, and injunctive relief for consumers on an individual and class action basis. It ends with a partial list of consumer associations and other private non-profits group working in the consumer protection field.

You can find it at

http://ssrn.com/abstract=1000226.

An Academic Who Opposes Amending the Federal Arbitration Act

Alan Scott Rau of the University of Texas at Austin School of Law argues against amending the FAA in his article "Federal Common Law and Arbitral Power, forthcoming in the University of Nevada Las Vegas Law Review.  Here's his abstract:     

In the face of an overwhelming preference - at least in
the academic community - for the reform of our "outdated" and
"skeletal" federal arbitration statute, I make a brief plea here
to leave the FAA completely alone.

The point is not simply that courts are more likely than
legislators to "get it right" (although I believe they are); nor
is it that the inevitable missteps and misjudgments of statutory
revision may be expected to be particularly resistant to change;
nor does my preference for legislative inaction rest entirely on
what is conjured up by the prospect of revisiting received
entitlements - the classic image of Pandora's Box.

I canvass a number of examples of both existing state
legislation, and current proposals for statutory amendment, all
of which seem to exemplify what we would have every reason to
expect from an ongoing process of legislative reform:

- a tendency to codify conceptualism,

- the unthinking aping of foreign models with no thought for
their congruence with American practice,

- the glittering temptation of sweeping systematization born of
overconfidence.

I end, finally, by turning to what will be the subject of a
second, longer article: The respective roles of courts and
arbitrators in deciding whether to refer a dispute to arbitration
is of course a recurring problem in any legal system, and the
treatment of the problem in American courts has exemplified the
common law at its best, able over time to get the job done well
enough, if roughly, and to forge sensible, durable,
commonly-accepted understandings.

You can find the article at http://ssrn.com/abstract=996481