2017, Consumer Law

The Seminar meets Tuesdays from 12:10 to 2:00 in SLB 121. Lunch is served from noon.

The Spring 2017 Seminar in Private Law will devote itself to consumer law. The Seminar will take up various aspects of consumer law, including consumer finance, bankruptcy, dispute regulation, behavioral regulation of consumer transactions, regulatory agency design, and housing.

January 31      The Rise of Mandatory Arbitration and the Demise of Class Actions

Myriam Gilles, Cardozo Law School

Deepak Gupta, Gupta Wessler

Readings will be available here.

February 21      Behavioral Economics and Consumer Law

Oren Bar-Gill, Harvard Law School

Alan Schwartz, Yale Law School

Professor Schwartz's texts will be available here. Professor Bar-Gill's text is available to Yale Law School community members here and by request to sadie.blanchard@yale.edu.

February 28      Consumer Transactions in the Information Society

Margaret Jane Radin, University of Michigan School of Law

Rory Van Loo, Boston University Law School 

Professor Van Loo's papers are available here and here. We will read pages 20 to 22 and 39 to 41 of "Rise of the Digital Regulator" and pages 548 to 584 of "The Corporation as Courthouse" (through Part II).

Professor Radin's text is available on SSRN.

March 7      Performance-Based Consumer Law

Lauren Willis, Loyola Law School, Los Angeles

Reading will be available here.

March 21      Housing Law

Richard Epstein, NYU Law School

Lee Fennell, University of Chicago Law School

Readings are available here and by request to sadie.blanchard@yale.edu. We will focus on Part I of Prof. Epstein's Chapter 3. His article "Rent Control and the Theory of Efficient Regulation" is supplemental reading.

April 4      Consumer Finance, Race, and Contract Design

Bertram Lomfeld, Free University of Berlin

Fred Wherry, Yale University, Department of Sociology

Readings will be available to Yale Law School community members here and by request to sadie.blanchard@yale.edu.

April 11      Debt, Labor, and Regulatory Agency Design

Rachel Barkow, NYU School of Law

Noah Zatz, UCLA Law School

Prof. Zatz's paper is available to Yale Law School communtiy members here and by request to sadie.blanchard@yale.edu. Prof. Barkow's paper is available here.

April 18      Mandatory Labeling

Cass Sunstein, Harvard Law School

Reading is available here.