Plaintiffs invoke consumer-protection laws in California, specifically, because Linden Lab is based in San Francisco.
He wants a small, separate, consumer-protection and competition ministry, with residual industry-related work done by the Treasury.
"This is a very basic consumer-protection law and it is also a very basic civil-rights law, " said Mr. Mintz.
He eventually will run a new consumer-protection group, to be spun out of the FSA, called the Financial Conduct Authority.
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Under the broad consumer-protection laws of states like Washington, lawyers can seek treble damages for anything that smacks of fraud.
So plaintiff lawyers typically retreat to consumer-protection laws, which are vague enough in some states to allow a lawsuit over almost anything.
He supports a new model law for the states that would bring lawyers under consumer-protection laws including prohibitions against misleading advertising.
The suits allege, among other things, that Merck violated consumer-protection laws and that its top executives profited from false and misleading statements about the drug.
There have been similar unpleasant surprises in employment and consumer-protection law.
Things stand to improve going forward as financing continues to become more available, as resort development recovers, and also as consumer-protection legislation increases confidence in the industry.
Most rely on broadly written consumer-protection laws that don't require plaintiffs to prove they were injured, or, in some states, even misled by the company they're suing.
Second, it would set up a consumer-protection agency that would try to protect consumers from taking out loans they cannot afford or buying products with hidden costs.
And in the United States, the Electronic Privacy Information Centre, a non-profit group, has asked America's Federal Trade Commission to see if Facebook's approach to privacy violates consumer-protection laws.
In early 2001 several executives of Ajinomoto, a Japanese company that produces monosodium glutamate, a flavour enhancer, were arrested in Indonesia and charged with breaking the country's consumer-protection laws.
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Consumer-protection lobbyist group Public Citizen says that in seven major businesses including banks, credit-card companies, computer manufacturers and brokerages at least 75% of companies now include such provisions in their fine print.
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And its Congressional allies dug in to block the appointment of a federal consumer-protection watchdog, in hopes of crippling the fledgling agency dedicated to protecting ordinary Americans from predatory banking practices.
Liberals tend to favor a strong central government, except when that government threatens to steamroller strong state consumer-protection laws, or the ability of class-action lawyers to pursue cases over consumer products.
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Howard Beales, who led the FTC's consumer-protection bureau from 2001 to 2004, said the recent jump in complaints against debt collectors should have triggered an increase in enforcement actions, despite the agency's limited resources.
In exchange they would get an immensely valuable release from any future lawsuits of this nature, including suits based on state consumer-protection laws that require a lower standard of proof than ordinary fraud claims.
The problem is lawyers must convince the judge there is some way to conduct a trial that will account for the different rights consumers in 50 different states have under their own consumer-protection laws.
Even more than makers of physical goods, Europe's service providers are hindered by all sorts of petty bureaucratic rules, often justified on dubious health, safety or consumer-protection grounds, which discourage them from entering new markets.
In around two-thirds of cases, Microsoft relies on old consumer-protection and fraud laws rather than new legislation specifically designed to counter spam (though the firm supports spam laws, as they tend to eliminate legal loopholes).
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But it has left itself open to attack by demanding more oversight of the financial system when critics say it did not make good use of its existing powers to supervise banks and enforce consumer-protection laws before the crisis.
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Consumer advocates and some industry analysts contend that the agency long courted big banks to choose the OCC as their regulator by offering a lax approach to supervision and taking the side of banks in striking down state consumer-protection laws.
The consumer-protection unit of the state attorney general's office received just two complaints about locksmiths in more than a decade one in 2006, the year before the law took effect, and one in 2008, the year after, according to Tom Bates, who runs the division.
Businesses complain that the administration has consistently demonized them with its rhetoric, turned a deaf ear to its pleas for tax changes that foster U.S. competitiveness, created a monster in the new consumer-protection agency for the financial system, and hobbled them with draconian health and environmental mandates.
The 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act created broad-based changes to how creditors make loans including new ability-to-repay standards, which we are charged with implementing.
And I think the progress we've seen now where you see again broad recognition from a lot of the opponents of consumer -- that we were going to have strong independent consumer protection authority is the result of that attention.
Members of the Senate Banking Committee have been considering a deal that would establish a consumer protection division--headed by a political appointee--within the Federal Reserve.
The SEC has finally managed to find a worthy recipient for its first bounty payment under the whistleblower program established by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 (Dodd-Frank).
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