consumer protection

Ergobaby, a manufacturer of baby carriers, has revealed itself as the company that fought to keep its court fight over a consumer product safety report secret, Legal Times reports. The Fourth Circuit ruled that the district court should not have let the company shield its name from the public as it fought to keep the Consumer Product Safety Commission from publishing an incident report about an infant's death--allegedly from one of its products--in an online database.

Craig Zucker founded Buckyballs, a desk toy of small magnets that can be stacked into infinite shapes. But "perhaps more than 1,000" kids have swallowed the magnets and needed to undergo surgery, The Washington Post reports. Now the Consumer Product Safety Commission is seeking to hold Zucker personally liable for the $57 million recall because he dissolved his business, The Post further reports: "The commission supported that move with a legal precedent known as the Park doctrine, which allows the government to criminally prosecute corporate officers for failing to prevent violations of the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act."

The Consumer Financial Protection  Bureau has filed a brief in a federal court siding with  "Benjamin Lawsky, New York’s top financial regulator, against a lawsuit from two western Native American tribes," The Daily Caller reported. The tribes sued over cease-and-desist letters sent by Lawsky over the online payday loan businesses. Lawsky contend that the interest rates charged by the businesses for their loans are too high, while the tribes argue that they are sovereign entities and they follow federal law, The Daily Caller further reported.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau entered a $19 million settlement with payday lender Cash America, the Washington Post reported. Among other faulty practices, Cash America used robosigned a lawyer's signature on court documents, helping "the company improperly squeeze money out of at least 14,397 Americans, who are entitled to millions of dollars in restitution," The Post further reported.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the 22-year-old Telephone Consumer Protection Act, which curbs the phone calls allowed to consumer phone calls, has seen an uptick in litigation in recent years: "Since 2012, more than a dozen companies, including Papa John's International Inc., Bank of America Corp. and a Jiffy Lube International Inc. franchisee, have agreed to more than $200 million in settlements in TCPA suits. Four-fifths of all federal TCPA cases filed in or transferred to federal court have occurred in the past five years, according to a search of court records."

If companies use auto-dialers to call cell phones without consent, they "can be on the hook for $500 to $1,500 a call," the WSJ also reports.

The New York Times commentator Floyd Norris reports on a study that found that a federal law called the 2009 Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act--which requires more transparency on the fees credit card companies collect from their customers--actually worked. The researchers expected to find that, if credit card companies couldn't charge those fees anymore, they would start charging customers more interest  or  reduce consumers' access to credit. But what the study found: "It cut down the costs of credit cards, particularly for borrowers with poor credit."

There has been an increasing push by plaintiffs attorneys to pursue theories of liability against medical journals and medical publishers for harm allegedly caused to their clients from drugs they ingested. The National Law Journal reports that the First Circuit has rejected "a Massachusetts consumer protection case against two doctors, a medical journal and its publisher over an allegedly flawed article cited by defendants in birth-injury medical malpractice cases." The author of the opinion said "'the plaintiffs' theory of the case is imaginative but unpersuasive,"' The National Law Journal also reports.

The court did not reach the issue of the First Amendment in the case.