Righting a Financial Wrong: Debt Settlement Services, Private Student Lenders, and Auto Lenders Use Forced Arbitration to Escape Accountability When They Harm Consumers

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB, or "the Bureau") in December 2013 released preliminary results of a study called for in the 2010 Dodd -- Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act on financial services businesses' use of arbitration clauses in consumer contracts. Such terms, or forced arbitration, call for disputes to be settled before a private arbitrator instead of in a court of law, and usually prohibit consumers from pursuing cases as a class. The data from the first report covered several aspects of forced arbitration. For example, it confirmed a high prevalence of arbitration clauses in the terms of service of credit cards, checking accounts, and prepaid cards. Additionally, according to the report, nearly all of the arbitration clauses contained terms denying their customers the ability to participate in class actions.Based on an examination of the data from the American Arbitration Association (AAA), the chief provider of consumer arbitrations, the Bureau determined that few consumers go to arbitration to resolve disputes with financial institutions.In making these and other determinations, the Bureau examined information involving four major financial services and products: credit cards, checking accounts, prepaid cards and payday loans. Other consumer financial services sectors under the CFPB's jurisdiction similarly use forced arbitration clauses and prohibit class actions. Notably, the debt settlement and auto loan sectors recently have fallen under considerable scrutiny by the Bureau and other state and federal officials for engaging in questionable practices. A review of materials involving these sectors shows that businesses within them have used forced arbitration to avoid having to respond to allegations and, in many instances, escaped accountability for actual wrongdoing. Meanwhile, users of their products and services who have suffered financial injuries from predatory and deceptive practices have been denied adequate legal remedies. Another sector that makes widespread use of forced arbitration clauses is the private student loan industry. The agency recently released findings from its investigation into the private student loan market, which documented the impact of the high-cost loans. In 2012, Public Citizen also issued a report on the industry. It concluded that unsavory conduct by the private student loan industry combined with restrictive terms in borrowers' promissory notes that require disputes to be resolved in private arbitration were not conducive to fair lending.The Bureau can make these industry sectors answerable for some of their shady practices by restoring consumers' ability to enforce their rights on their own. The Bureau has the authority to write a rule to require the regulated consumer financial services industry to eliminate predispute binding mandatory (or forced) arbitration from consumer transactions involving all products under its jurisdiction

Cases That Would Have Been: Three Years After AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion, Claims of Corporate Wrongdoing Continue to Pile Up

In the wake of two U.S. Supreme Court rulings in the past three years, consumers, workers and others harmed by unfair fine print in contracts are increasingly being shut out of the courthouse, a new Public Citizen and National Association of Consumer Advocates (NACA) report shows.The report identifies 140 cases affecting thousands of consumers or employees over the past three years where a court enforced an arbitration clause and barred the claimants from participating in class actions

APPROACHES TO CORPORATE GOVERNANCE

This paper explores the question ?what is corporate governance?? It examines dominant theoretical approaches to the subject, and reviews influential legislative attempts to address the area in the United States as well as the United Kingdom. Inconsistencies between theoretical approaches to the subject and practical frameworks will be discussed, along with the implications of current frameworks in the US and UK. It will be concluded that legislative reform ought to address the dynamic nature of corporate governance by focusing on widening the scope of actors, and embodying a collaborative approach between businesses, governments, and other stakeholders

Exploring Terrestrial Planet Formation in the TW Hydrae Association

Spitzer Space Telescope infrared measurements are presented for 24 members of the TW Hydrae association (TWA). High signal-to-noise 24-micron (um) photometry is presented for all of these stars, including 20 stars that were not detected by IRAS. Among these 20 stars, only a single object, TWA 7, shows excess emission at 24um and at the level of only 40% above the star's photosphere. TWA 7 also exhibits a strong 70um excess that is a factor of 40 brighter than the stellar photosphere at this wavelength. At 70um, an excess of similar magnitude is detected for TWA 13, though no 24um excess was detected for this binary. For the 18 stars that failed to show measurable IR excesses, the sensitivity of the current 70um observations does not rule out substantial cool excesses at levels 10-40x above their stellar continua. Measurements of two T Tauri stars, TW Hya and Hen 6-300, confirm that their spectacular IR spectral energy distributions (SEDs) do not turn over even by 160um, consistent with the expectation for their active accretion disks. In contrast, the Spitzer data for the luminous planetary debris systems in the TWA, HD 98800B and HR 4796A, are consistent with single-temperature blackbody SEDs. The major new result of this study is the dramatic bimodal distribution found for the association in the form of excess emission at a wavelength of 24um, indicating negligible amounts of warm (>100 K) dust and debris around 20 of 24 stars in this group of very young stars. This bimodal distribution is especially striking given that the four stars in the association with strong IR excesses are >100x brighter at 24um than their photospheres