Public Justice

Ohio Joins the List of States Banning Payday Lending; Who Will Make the Sharks Follow the Law?

2008-06-09T13:30:00Z

On Monday June 2, Ohio Governor Ted Strickland signed into law a new statute that bans payday lending and caps the interest rate on loans at 28%. Last Fall, the U.S. Congress passed a statute that capped interest rates at 36% for certain loans for members of the military. (The statute that Congress passed was then gutted to a shocking extent by the Department of Defense. Under heavy pressure from banking industry lobbyists, the Department of Defense wrote regulations purporting to limit the scope...(read more)

A Late Start and a Small Start With Credit Cards

2008-05-08T09:00:00Z

The credit card industry has really been running wild lately. After a frenzy of acquisitions and consolidation in the last several decades, only a few major banks issue the vast majority of credit cards in the United States, and the industry has been able to get more and more Americans to take out heavier and heavier debt loads. Today, America’s credit card debt load is approaching one trillion dollars (with millions of families having ten or more cards and more than $10,000 in outstanding debts),...(read more)

Supreme Court’s Hall Street Decision Reinforces Lawless Nature of Arbitration

2008-04-08T13:00:00Z

To people who’ve been paying attention (which is not, unfortunately, most of the American public), it’s not exactly news that Corporate America has been exempting itself from most of the United States civil legal system. Most consumer business-to-contracts and a growing number of employment contracts contain terms that provide that if the individual has a dispute against a corporation, they cannot bring a lawsuit in court, but instead they have to take their dispute to a private arbitrator who is...(read more)

The United States Supreme Court Takes On Four Preemption Cases Affecting Consumer Rights

2008-03-08T14:00:00Z

Nearly 25 years ago, the first brief that Public Justice (then Trial Lawyers for Public Justice) filed in the U.S. Supreme Court opposed federal preemption of an injury victim's claim. It urged the Supreme Court to hold that Karen Silkwood could seek punitive damages against the Kerr-McGee Corporation for contaminating her with plutonium even though the company had complied with the federal government's regulations governing the safety of nuclear power plants. The Supreme Court agreed, 5 to 4. Since...(read more)