Impostor scams have recently become the most common type of consumer scam in America, surpassing identity theft. It has never been easier and more profitable to be an impostor scammer. Though the core of these scams dates back centuries, these fraudsters consistently find novel ways to...

The American public donates a staggering amount of money to nonprofit charities. These charities routinely solicit and receive money from donors for specific, earmarked purposes. Often, however, charities ignore their obligations to use money for these designated uses. In many circumstances,...

Advertised price discounting recently proliferated in retail markets, bringing with it deceptive discounting or "fictitious pricing." Many retailers advertise discounts based on fictitious or false prior-reference prices. In the immediate postwar era, the Federal Trade Commission regularly...

Concerns about fictitious pricing and bait-and-switch practices, once commonplace, have been relegated to the regulatory attic for far too long. The singular theme that undergirds these tactics, “dishonest” search disruption, highlights a broader concern about how these tactics disrupt...

In 1821, Judge Burrough famously described the public policy defense in contract law as a “very unruly horse.” To test this proposition, this Article presents the first systematic content analysis of public policy defense case law. The sparse previous literature and commentaries on this...

Free offers - the practice wherein firms market goods and services by claiming that they are free - have been overlooked for too long from a structural regulatory perspective. These offers have become so ingrained into our consumer culture that they often go unnoticed, viewed as part of the...

This Article explores the role of paternalism in regulatory efforts to improve public health, focusing mostly on obesity, but also accounting for recent developments in other public-health arenas. First, the Article describes a spectrum of interventions that regulators can implement in the...

“Mediated reputation systems,” like Yelp, Angie’s List, and Consumer-Affairs, enable consumers to access a new and powerful trove of peer experiential information about businesses and their services. This information, often sought right in the midst of a transactional decision, purports to...

Why did the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) aggressively pursue Volkswagen’s claims about “clean-diesel” technology, while ignoring widespread practices like deceptive discount pricing? Why did the FTC offer formal guidance to industry about “native advertising,” but only casual...

'Bait and switch' can describe a range of commercial behaviors common in the everyday marketplace, but virtually ignored in the academic literature. The traditional definition of unlawful bait and switch applies to insincere offers to sell one item in order to induce the buyer to purchase...