CJ Member Peter Holland has published an article titled “The One Hundred Billion Dollar Problem in Small Claims Court: Robo-Signing and Lack of Proof in Debt Buyer Cases.”  Below is the abstract.  ABSTRACT Recent years have seen the rise of a new industry which has clogged the dockets of small claims courts throughout the country. It is known as the "debt buyer" industry. Members of this $100 billion per year industry exist for no reason other than to purchase consumer debt which others have already deemed uncollectable, and then try to succeed in collecting where others have failed. Debt buyers pay pennies on the dollar for this charged off debt, and then seek to collect, through hundreds of thousands of lawsuits, the full face value of the debt. The emergence and vitality of this industry presents several legal, ethical and economic issues which merit exploration, study and scholarly debate.

This article focuses on the problem of robo-signing and the lack of proof in debt buyer cases. Although this...

   On June 27, 2011, Civil Justice submitted to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) its comments regarding the OCC’s proposed regulatory amendments in response to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.  The Act was created to address serious problems with how consumers are protected from fraudulent or otherwise unethical behavior on the part of lenders, including mortgage companies.  Chief among these problems is the OCC’s 2004 regulation implementing the National Bank Act, which prevented a great number of state laws that protected consumers from abusive lending practices from being enforced against national banks.  This preemption of state law enabled national banks to engage in predatory and reckless lending practices and played a direct and significant role in causing the current financial crisis.      Unfortunately, the proposed regulations do not solve this problem, but rather amount to more of the same.  For example, while the Act specifically restricts the OCC’s...

HBO will be airing an important documentary film about tort reform and its threat to the civil justice system called “Hot Coffee” on Monday, June 27, 2011 at 9pm.  The documentary follows four people, including the infamous McDonald’s Hot coffee lawsuit plaintiff Stella Liebeck, whose lives have been affected by their inability to access the courts, and how caps on damages hurt them.  The film also examines the role of corporations and a complicit media in promoting tort reform.  “Hot Coffee” was a selection of the 2011 Sundance Film Festival.  Watch a trailer of the documentary here, and for a review of the movie, click here.