By Adrian Alvarez, Goldberg-Robb Attorney, and Adele Kimmel, Managing Attorney We’ve been following the story of Josi Harrison, a 15-year old from Clatskanie, Oregon, who is displaying great courage in speaking publicly about a “sextortion” scheme at her school that resulted in her providing nude…
By Paul Bland, Senior Attorney @PblandBland Periodically, people ask me rhetorical questions like, “How much worse can the law of arbitration get? I mean, it’s so incredibly bad that it has to have bottomed out, right?” As Jane Wagner famously wrote, no matter how cynical you…
By Amy Radon, Staff Attorney Western Sky Financial, a payday loan company affiliated with the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, announced yesterday that it is exiting the payday lending business effective next week. I don’t think anyone would dispute that Western Sky’s decision is in the…
By Jessica Culpepper, Food Safety & Health Attorney Earlier this summer, in our series of cases against five mega-dairies in Washington State, U.S. District Judge Thomas Rice denied the defendants’ motions to dismiss. This was an important win. The lawsuit that Public Justice and the…
By Amy Radon, Staff Attorney It’s about time for the plaintiffs’ bar to get serious about the issue of court secrecy and take corporate wrongdoers to task when they try to restrict public access to discovery materials, court records, and settlements that belong in the…
By Claire Prestel, Staff Attorney Last week, my colleague Vicky Ni blogged about EEOC v. Houston Funding II, Ltd., the Fifth Circuit’s ruling that discrimination against breastfeeding workers is discrimination against women. That’s a great (long-overdue!) victory, but as Vicky mentioned, the sad truth is…
By Paul Bland, Senior Attorney One of the most important provisions of the landmark Dodd-Frank Act was giving the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau the power to ban or regulate the use of forced arbitration clauses by lenders subject to its jurisdiction. Predictably, this…
By Paul Bland, Senior Attorney In the race to the bottom to insulate corporations from wrongdoing using forced arbitration, two judges in the Seventh Circuit just made a bid for one of the most anti-consumer decisions of the year. For many years, the National Arbitration…
By Spencer Wilson and Paul Bland Today, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued a great decision for consumers in Murphy v. DirecTV. On the plus side, the court allowed cheated consumers to pursue their legal claims against Best Buy, which was…
By Victoria Ni, Senior Attorney Sometime during early childhood, I’m sure you picked up these facts of life: Only women can bear children, and only women can produce breastmilk. It’s human biology. There are no exceptions. But for courts, nothing — not even human biology…
