This paper is a contribution to Chapman Law Review's symposium, From Wall Street to Main Street: The Future of Financial Regulation. It explores the Dodd-Frank Act's creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and specifically assesses the Bureau's new power to regulate alternative...

Critics of fringe banking - products like payday loans, pawn loans, and rent-to-own leases - frequently argue that using these products causes borrowers to experience financial distress. This argument has enormous intuitive appeal: Fringe credit is very costly, and usually the borrowers who are...

In February 2010, the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility, and Disclosure (“CARD”) Act intervened in student credit card markets in a dramatic way, attempting to prevent student over-indebtedness, to end aggressive marketing to college students, and to reveal and change avaricious...

Despite the fact they are used by millions of Americans, auto title loans have received little attention in the legal literature about consumer credit. Friends and foes of title lending make confident statements about their net welfare effects, but we still lack empirical data on many of the...

Millions of credit-constrained borrowers turn to title loans to meet their liquidity needs. Legislatures and regulators have debated how to best regulate these transactions, but surprisingly, we still know very little about the customers who use title loans. This Article reports findings from...

Employers frequently make mistakes and overpay their employees. For instance, the federal government alone, which makes up only around 2% of the U.S. workforce, will likely overpay its employees by $2 billion this year. After discovering the error, employers often recoup the mistaken...

When Justice Blackmun authored the famed opinion striking down the universal ban on lawyer advertising in Bates v. Arizona State Bar, he envisioned opening the market to information and competition in ways that would address a long-enduring access to justice problem for low and moderate income...

When the majority of modern contract and consumer protection laws were written in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, consumers almost always acted as buyers, and businesses almost always acted as sellers. As a result, these laws reflect a model of strong sellers and weak buyers. But paradigms are...

Access to affordable credit played a central role in the Civil Rights Movement. But today, racial and ethnic minorities oversubscribe to high-cost lending products like payday loans and underuse more affordable credit options that traditional banks offer. These trends remain even when...