Category: Consumer Contracts

  • Driven to Bankruptcy — New Research from the Consumer Bankruptcy Project

    Posted by

    Pamela Foohey

    In America, people drive — to work, to the doctor, to the grocery store, to their kids' daycare, to see their aging parents. Research shows that car ownership increases the probability of employment and number of hours worked; households without cars have lower incomes and are more likely to be in poverty. In short, cars are essential. Household financial distress can threaten people's cars, and with them, the day-to-day stability that car ownership brings. People thus may file bankruptcy, in part, to save their cars.

    Although there is a substantial literature on financial distress and home ownership, the literature on car ownership, financial distress, and bankruptcy is thin. In Driven to Bankruptcy (available via SSRN, forthcoming in the Wake Forest Law Review), Slipster Bob Lawless, past Slipster Debb Thorne, and I document what happens to car owners and their car loans when they enter bankruptcy.

    In brief, we find that people who file bankruptcy own automobiles at the same rate as the general population. This means that over the last ten years, 15.1 million people filed for bankruptcy owning 16.4 million cars. The majority of these cars, particularly a household's most valuable car, entered bankruptcy encumbered with a hefty loan. And most debtors want to keep their cars, particularly their most valuable and second most valuable cars.

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  • Ditech, Reverse Mortgages, Consumer Concerns, and Section 363(o)

    Posted by

    Pamela Foohey

    A couple days ago, Judge Garrity Jr. of the Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York issued a 132 page opinion denying confirmation of Ditech's proposed plan. Ditech, of course, is an originator and servicer of mortgages, including reverse mortgages. Its plan contemplated sales of both its forward and reverse mortgage businesses–free and clear of customers' claims and defenses. As reported at various times since Ditech filed in February 2019, homeowners have claims that Ditech did not credit mortgage payments properly, levied improper fees, failed to recognize tax payment plans, and wrongly foreclosed on homes.

    Beyond its sheer length, the opinion is noteworthy for a couple reasons. First, the sales of mortgage businesses in the context of a plan raised the question of whether § 363(o) applied. Section 363(o) deals with consumer credit transactions subject to the Truth in Lending Act and provides that if any "interest" in such a transaction is purchased through a sale, then the buyer must take all the claims and defenses related to the consumer credit transaction. Ditech, of course, wanted to sell free and clear of those claims, through the plan. In holding that § 363(o) does not apply in the plan context, Judge Garrity Jr. provides a detailed analysis of the section's legislative history. This history includes removal of language about application to reorganization plans by an amendment proposed by Senator Phil Gramm (which was approved), and Senator Gramm's continued opposition to the addition of § 363(o) in its entirety because he claimed it would, among other things, encourage people to make up grievances against mortgage originators and servicers. (As many readers likely know, Senator Gramm spearheaded the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.)

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  • What Is “Credit”? AfterPay, Earnin’, and ISAs

    Posted by

    Adam Levitin
    A major issue in consumer finance regulation in mid-20th century was what counted as “credit” and was therefore subject to state usury laws and (after 1968) to the federal Truth in Lending Act. Many states had a time-price differential doctrine that held that when a retailer sold goods for future payment, the differential between the price of a cash sale and that of credit sale was not interest for usury law purposes. State retail installment loan acts began to override the time-price doctrine, however, and the federal Truth in Lending Act and regulations thereunder eventually made clear that for its purposes the difference was a “finance charge” that had to be disclosed in a certain way. 
     
    Today, we seem to be coming back full circle to the question of what constitutes “credit.” We’re seeing this is three different product contexts: buy-now-pay-later products like Afterpay; and payday advance products like Bridgit, Dave, and Earnin’; and Income-Sharing Agreements or ISAs (used primarily for education financing). Each of these three product types has a business model that is based on it not being subject to some or all “credit” regulation. Whether those business models are well-founded legally is another matter.
     
    Let me briefly recap what is “credit” for different regulatory purposes and then turn to its application to the types of products.

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  • The Mad Mad World of “No Contest” Provisions in Wills

    Posted by

    Mitu Gulati

    It has been almost twenty-five years since I got hooked on the puzzle of why boilerplate financial contracts, even among the most sophisticated parties, have inefficient terms. Steve Choi and I were taking Marcel Kahan’s Corporate Bond class and we couldn’t understand why the classical model with its highly informed repeat players (with everyone hiring expensive lawyers) wasn’t working to produce the optimal package of contract terms. Marcel presented a very coherent set of explanations for this phenomenon of contract stickiness having to do primarily with network and learning externalities.  And under that model, it was plausible to have equilibria where sophisticated commercial parties and their lawyers could know that they had suboptimal contract terms and yet be somehow unable to change them easily (thereby creating the phenomenon of “sticky” contracts).  Marcel though repeatedly emphasized to us that he had but scratched the surface of a topic worthy of much more investigation (for the classic Kahan & Klausner (1997) paper and its equally wonderful predecessor by Goetz & Scott (1985), see here and here).

    Over the past two decades, since the publication of Kahan & Klausner’s sticky boilerplate paper, there have been a number of advances to our thinking about the phenomenon of sticky boilerplate. Most of them, however, have been focused on the worlds of mass market contracts of sophisticated finance or transactions where one of the sides to the transaction is a big repeat player (corporate bonds, sovereign bonds, M&A contracts, insurance). 

    A wonderful new boilerplate paper though takes on an altogether unexpected area where I had always thought of the contract-type instruments as being highly tailored: that of Wills. The paper is “Boilerplate No Contest Clauses” posted about a month ago by David Horton (UC Davis) and Reid Weisbord (Rutgers). 

    The paper identifies a persistent inefficiency in Wills – an area that I suspect most contract boilerplate scholars are utterly unaware to. That itself is interesting. But this paper goes beyond the traditional boilerplate contract scholarship which, as noted, identified the stickiness problem in mass market contracts.  Wills, as I understand the story that David and Reid tell, tend to always have both an element of tailoring for the individual client and an element of blind unthinking cutting and pasting from prior standard forms. What David and Reid show beautifully in their paper is that the boilerplate portion of the contract (and specifically, the “No Contest” provision) can often undermine the tailored portion that more specifically reflects the intent of the party making the Will.

    For those not familiar with these clauses, the following is typical:

    If any beneficiary under this Will in any manner, directly or indirectly, contests or attacks this Will or any of its provisions, any share of interest in my estate given to that contesting beneficiary under this Will is revoked . . . . “

    Basically, this says: Don’t you dare challenge this Will. If you do, you might lose everything.

    Problem is, as David and Reid explain, that there are situations where complications arise with the Will and someone has to go to court to get the complications resolved. That then presents the risk that some dastardly beneficiary will claim that the No Contest clause has been triggered vis-à-vis the innocent beneficiary who is just trying to solve a problem with the Will that the testator didn’t take into account. End result: The intentions of the testator are undermined. Even if the court ultimately tosses the challenges being made on the basis of the No Contest clause, time and money gets wasted.

    Why does this clause persist?  The answer given by Reid and David is straightforward: These clauses are cut and paste from prior Wills without thought. They are part of the boilerplate that neither the lawyers nor their clients pay any attention to.  But why not?  The standard explanations from the boilerplate literature such as network/learning externalities, first mover disadvantages, negative signaling, status quo bias, inadequate litigation, etc., do not seem to apply particularly well.  Nor do explanations about big firms who are repeat players exploiting innocent customers who are one shot players.  So, given that the standard explanations do not work, why is the subset of the market for legal services not working?  Are the lawyers not being paid enough to read the boilerplate portions of the Wills and think through the contingencies?  (Best I can tell, the lawyers do actually understand the problem, since there has been lots of litigation over these types of clauses).

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  • Podcast on ALI Consumer Contracts Restatement

    Posted by

    Adam Levitin

    I did a podcast for the Consumer Finance Monitor Podcast about the American Law Institute's Consumer Contracts Restatement project.  It's not often that you will see me on the same side of an issue as the podcast's host, Alan Kaplinsky, an attorney at Ballard Spahr who represents financial services firms.  Indeed, I suspect the next time Alan is sitting across a table from me asking me questions, it will be at a deposition.  Given what a great radio voice Alan has, that might almost be fun. But our collaboration on this podcast goes to an important, but hard to understand thing about why both consumer groups and business groups are opposed to the Restatement.  

    Both consumer and business groups are uncomfortable with the ALI acting as a private legislature, unchecked by any constituency.  But the real issue is that for consumer advocates, the Restatement is a bad project because it would bind all consumers to contractual terms that they do not agree with or even know about.  

    In contrast, the concern for business groups is that the Restatement gives that small subset of consumers who litigate somewhat stronger tools.  These tools aren't strong enough to change the balance of power, but they are enough to be a pain for businesses, specifically a jettisoning of the parol evidence rule (i.e., it doesn't matter what the written contract says, the salesman's representations are admissible evidence) and a contract defense of deception that will apply to some contracts where UDAP would not (again, you've gotta worry about the sales rep's communications).  In other words, the concerns here aren't symmetrical, so this is not a situation where the Restatement is a moderate neutral position.  It's bad for all consumers, and it creates more litigation problems for businesses without creating meaningful consumer protections.   

     

  • ALI Consumer Contracts Restatement–More Problems with the Legal Research

    Posted by

    Adam Levitin

    More problems are emerging with the legal research underlying the American Law Institute's Consumer Contracts Restatement project.  The Consumer Contracts Restatement has been the subject of scholarly criticism for a while because of its novel quantitative empirical approach (case counting).  The Restatement stands on six empirical studies of consumer contracts.  While the current draft claims that these studies merely serve as confirmation for the Restatement's positions, which were supposedly arrived at through the traditional method of reading and distilling the law from the cases, all of the early drafts of the Restatement said nothing about this traditional method and only relied on the empirical studies, which now conveniently arrive at exactly the same positions.  

    The first two scholarly works to examine the legal research underlying the Restatement were one by Professor Gregory Klass at Georgetown Law and another by yours truly with seven other ALI members.  These studies were basically looking for "false positives"–cases claimed to be relevant by the Restatement that aren't.  Both studies found an incredibly high rate of false positives–over 50% in some instances.  The Restatement had included in its case count, among other things, completely irrelevant cases, such as business-to-business cases, cases not involving common law contract disputes, duplicate cases, and vacated cases.  These types of errors were pretty shocking in what should be a document based on unimpeachable legal research.  A nice summary write-up of these studies by Professor Martha Ertman can be found over at JOTWELL (the Journal of Things We Like Lots).  

    Now Professor William Widen at the University of Miami has done some digging on the Restatement's treatment of pay-now, terms-later contracts. Professor Widen's preliminary research has found that there's also a false negative problem–the Restatement has missed a number of state Supreme Court cases, many of which are contrary to its position.  Additionally, the Restatement seems to have missed a substantial number of state Supreme Court cases that make clear that providing "notice" in consumer contracts means actual knowledge, not merely notional notice.  In short, there is increasing evidence of serious problems with the legal research underlying the Restatement, both false positives and false negatives.  My sense is that with more time, research will adduce even more false negatives.  Given that the ALI likes to present itself as the gold standard of legal research, these problems should give ALI membership pause when considering approving the Restatement.  

  • ALI Consumer Contracts Restatement-What’s at Stake

    Posted by

    Adam Levitin

    The American Law Institute's membership will vote next Tuesday (the 21st) on whether to approve the ALI's Consumer Contracts Restatement project.  Let me recap why you should care about this project:  it opens the door for businesses to use contract to abuse consumers in basically any way they want.  The Restatement would do away with the idea of a "meeting of the minds," as the touchstone of contract law for consumer contracts, and allow businesses to impose any terms they want on consumers, even if the consumers are unaware of the terms and haven't consented to them.  

    Under the proposed Restatement, a consumer would be bound by any and all of a business's standard form terms if the consumer (1) assented to a transaction, (2) had notice of the terms, and (3) had a reasonable opportunity to review the terms.  In other words, the consumer would not actually have to know or agree to any of the terms to be bound by them.  The Restatement would replace meaningful assent with a legal fiction of notice.  That opens the door to consumers being deprived of all sorts of rights by contract, starting with arbitration, but then going on the privacy rights and continuing to disclaimer of warranties, etc.  If you think I'm being paranoid, go look at Walmart.com's Terms of Use. Few, if any, of those terms exist when you buy something from Walmart at a storefront, but the cost of larding on an extra term on the Internet is so low, that there's no reason for a business not to bury its whole Christmas wishlist in linked on-line terms and conditions.  

    The Restatement strangely believes that courts will somehow police abuses of contract through unconscionability and deception, but this presumes (1) that consumers will litigate in the first place, and (2) that courts will stretch these constrained doctrines to prevent the enforcement of not just outrageous terms, but also quotidian unfair terms.  Do I have a nice bridge to sell you in Brooklyn if you think that's a trade-off that will help consumers….

    A bipartisan group of 23 state Attorneys General has recently written publicly opposing the Restatement. That sort of opposition is unprecedented and is a sign that something is seriously amiss with the project. 

    So, if you know an ALI member, urge them to attend the Annual Meeting session and vote against the Restatement!

  • ALI Engages in Cheap Intimidation Tactics in Its Attempt to Ram Through the Consumer Contracts Restatement

    Posted by

    Adam Levitin

    As Credit Slips readers know, I've been fighting the American Law Institute's Consumer Contracts Restatement project for several years.  I think it started with good intentions, but it's unfortunately turned into a remarkably anti-consumer project.  The ALI has accused yours truly of a copyright violation for making the draft Restatement available through Dropbox to other ALI members in the context of a link in a letter urging those ALI members to vote against the Restatement.    

    ALI's actions on this are the pettiest sort of bullying to try and quash the "vote no" campaign against a project that would seriously harm consumer rights.  ALI filed a DMCA takedown notice with Dropbox that resulted in Dropbox preventing me from sharing all my files, not just the one file in question. (Damages, damages…) ALI even went so far as to freeze me out of its website, which prevented me from reading comment letters about the draft or filing motions to amend it.  

    Fortunately, there's a good way to deal with bullies, and that's get a lawyer.  ALI restored my website access after hearing from my righteous copyright counsel, and has in fact since made the draft Restatement publicly available, even while still insisting (on a completely factually misinformed basis, but ALI never bothered to ask me) that what I did was somehow outside of fair use and refusing to rescind the DMCA takedown notice. It's become clear that ALI desperately needs to finish its Restatement of Copyright so it can understand how fair use actually works.    

    The fact that ALI is making the draft publicly available now just shows what nonsense its claim was—it was nothing but a cheap intimidation tactic. ALI ought to be ashamed for acting this way. Is this kind of thug behavior really how the nation's preeminent law reform organization rolls?  

  • Restatement of Consumer Contracts—On-Line Symposium

    Posted by

    Adam Levitin

    The Yale Journal on Regulation is holding an on-line symposium about the draft Restatement of the Law of Consumer Contracts, which is scheduled for a vote at the American Law Institute's annual meeting this May.  The launching point for the symposium are a pair of articles in JREG that take sharp issue with the empirical studies that underlie the draft Restatement.

    The American Law Institute (ALI) is a self-appointed college of cardinals of the American legal profession.  It's a limited size membership organization that puts out various publications, most notably "Restatements" of the law, which are attempts to summarize, clarify, and occasionally improve the law.  Restatements aren't actually law, but they are tremendously influential.  Litigants and courts cite them and they are used to teach law students.  In other words, this stuff matters, even if its influence is indirect. 

    The draft Restatement of Consumer Contracts is founded on a set of six quantitative empirical studies about consumer contracts.  This is a major and novel move for a Restatement; traditionally Restatements engaged in a qualitative distillation of the law.  Professor Gregory Klass of Georgetown has an article that attempts to replicate the Reporters' empirical study about the treatment of privacy policies as contracts.  He finds pervasive problems in the Reporters' coding, such as the inclusion of b2b cases in a consumer contracts restatement.  

    A draft version of Professor Klass's study inspired me and a number of other advisors to the Restatement project to attempt our own replication study of the empirical studies of contract modification and clickwrap enforcement.  We found the same sort of pervasive problems as Professor Klass.  While the ALI Council completely ignored our findings, we wrote them up into a companion article to Professor Klass's.  

    Some of the pieces posted to the symposium so far have been focused on replication study methodology (sort of beside the point given the very basic nature of the problems we identified) or defenses of the Reporters including mixed statutory-contract decisions in their data sets (which is no defense to inclusion of b2b cases or duplicate cases or vacated cases, etc.). But Mel Eisenberg has contributed an important piece that highlights some of the substantive problems with the draft Restatement, namely that it guts consumer protections.  For example, it would require findings of both procedural and substantive unconscionability for a contract to be unconscionable, while many states only require substantive unconscionability. Not surprisingly, I am unaware of any consumer law expert (other than the Reporters) who supports the project.  

    But this thing that should really be a wake up call that something is very, very off with this Restatement project is the presence of outside opposition, which is virtually unheard of in the ALI process.  Every major consumer group (also here, here, and here), weighed in in opposition as well as 13 state attorneys general (and also here), and our former co-blogger (and also former ALI Vice-Chair), Senator Elizabeth Warren.  Nor has the opposition been solely from consumer-minded groups.  The US Chamber of Commerce and the major trade associations for banking, telecom, retailers, and insurers are also opposed (albeit with very different motivations).  Simply put, it's hard to find anyone other than the Reporters (and the ALI Council, which has a strong tradition of deference to Reporters) who actually likes the draft Restatement.  

    So, if you're an ALI member, get informed.  If you know an ALI member, make sure that s/he is informed.  This is coming for a vote in May and if enacted would be bad policy, based on the legal equivalent of "junk science."  This isn't what the ALI should be doing.  

  • New Paper: Consumer Protection After the Global Financial Crisis

    Posted by

    Melissa Jacoby

    Historian Ed Balleisen and I have just posted a paper of interest to Credit Slips readers who are interested in consumer protection, financial crises, and inputs into post-crisis policymaking more generally. I will let the abstract speak for itself:

    Consumer Protection After the Global Financial Crisis

    Edward J. Balleisen & Melissa B. Jacoby

    Abstract

    Like other major events, the Global Financial Crisis generated a large and diffuse body of academic analysis. As part of a broader call for operationalizing the study of crises as policy shocks and resulting responses, which inevitably derail from elegant theories, we examine how regulatory protagonists approached consumer protection after the GFC, guided by six elements that should be considered in any policy shock context. After reviewing the introduction and philosophy of the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection, created as part of the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, we consider four examples of how consumer protection unfolded in the crises’ aftermath that have received less attention. Our case studies investigate a common set of queries. We sought to identify the parties who cared sufficiently about a given issue to engage with it and try to shape policy, as well as the evolving nature of the relevant policy agenda. We also looked for key changes in policy, which could be reflected in various forms—whether establishing an entirely new regulatory agency, formulating novel enforcement strategies, or deflecting policy reforms.

    The first of our case studies focuses on operations of the Federal Trade Commission in the GFC’s aftermath. Although the Dodd-Frank Act shifted some obligations toward the CFPB, we find that the FTC continued to worry about and seek to address fraud against consumers. But it tended to focus on shady practices that arose in response to the GFC rather than those that facilitated it. Our second case study examines the Congressional adoption of a carveout from CFPB authority for auto dealers, which resulted from strong lobbying by car companies worried about a cratering sales environment, and the aftermath of the policy. Here, we observe that this carveout allowed a significant amount of troubling auto lending activity to continue and expand, with potentially systemic consequences. Loan servicer misbehavior, particularly in the form of robosigning, is the focus of our third case study. Although Dodd-Frank did not explicitly address robosigning, the new agency it created, the CFPB, was able to draw on its broad authority to address this newly arising problem. And, because the CFPB had authority over student loan servicers, the agency could pivot relatively quickly from the mortgage context to the student loan context. Our fourth and final case study is the rise and fall of Operation Choke Point, an understandably controversial interagency program, convened by the U.S. Department of Justice, which, with the GFC fresh in mind, attempted to curtail fraudulent activities by cutting off access to online payment mechanisms. Here, we see an anti-fraud effort that was particularly vulnerable to a change in presidential administration and political climate because its designers had invested little effort in building public awareness and support for the program.

    The Article concludes with an overall assessment and suggestions for other focal points for which our approach would be useful. The examples span a range of other domestic and global policy contexts.