If you’ve ever purchased a car, you know that it is one of the most complicated, frustrating, and opaque consumer transactions—and one that is rife with junk fees and deceptive sales tactics. The Federal Trade Commission recently issued a landmark regulation, the Combating Auto Retail Scams (CARS) Rule, to tackle these problems and to mandate transparency and fairness in the vehicle buying process. And as the Center explained in an...
With help from the Center and our partner the Student Borrower Protection Center, last week student loan borrowers scored a major victory preserving the Department of Education’s Income-Driven Repayment (IDR) and Public Service Loan Forgiveness programs. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals threw out a challenge to these programs, which benefit borrowers who have endured years, even decades, of mismanagement of their student loans.
Today, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the independent funding structure of the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), ensuring that an agency that has returned more than $20 billion in wrongly-taken money to American consumers in the past dozen years will be able to continue doing the work it was designed to do.
The Court’s ruling rejected a challenge by the payday loan industry to the Bureau’s funding structure. Under the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, the Bureau requests its annual funding not from Congress — like...
Yesterday, the Center, along with a cavalcade of prominent consumer, worker and advocacy organizations, filed an amicus brief urging the California Supreme Court to implement recent decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court and reject an arbitration-specific version of equitable estoppel that allows corporate defendants to enforce arbitration clauses against consumers with whom they never signed a contract....
Yesterday, the Center, along with our co-counsel – Consumers for Auto Reliability and Safety (CARS), California Association for Microenterprise Opportunity (CAMEO), East Bay Community Law Center, Impact Fund, Legal Aid At Work, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, and Public Justice – filed an amicus brief ...
Last week, a federal court in Los Angeles upheld regulations promulgated by the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation (DFPI) that require sales-based financing providers to disclose their products' APR and other costs to borrowers, typically small businesses and micro-entrepreneurs. The Center, along with our co-counsel Public Counsel and fellow amici California Association for Microenterprise Opportunity (CAMEO), Responsible Business Lending...
The Center, along with our co-counsel Public Counsel, California Association for Microenterprise Opportunity, the Responsible Business Lending Coalition, and the Office of Kat Taylor, filed an amicus brief in the Central District of California in support of a California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation (DFPI) regulation requiring sales-based financing providers to disclose their APRs and...
Last week, the Center, along with our co-counsel Bay Area Legal Aid and OneJustice and ten other legal services organizations, filed an amicus brief urging the California Supreme Court to ensure that consumers with debt collection lawsuits can have their day in court when they...
Earlier today, the U.S. Supreme Court heard argument in USDA Rural Development Rural Housing Service v. Kirtz, a case that will decide whether the federal government can claim sovereign immunity as a defense against lawsuits brought under the Fair Credit Reporting Act. The Berkeley Center for Consumer Law and Economic Justice, along with the National Consumer Law Center, Public Justice, and the Housing Clinic of the Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization at Yale Law School, filed an...
Over the past several years and especially during the pandemic, companies have increasingly offered automatically renewing subscription-based services to their customers. After the initial subscription period (say, a year) for which the customer pays, the company automatically charges the customer for another term. These subscription services include an enormous range of businesses, from shopping sites like Amazon Prime, to entertainment streaming platforms like Netflix, to newspapers and apps and just about any other industry you can name.
