United States: Dodd-Frank, Consumer Protection Act

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit decided four arbitration cases in 2025, each addressing a different piece of the process: agreement formation, scope, waiver, and judicial oversight of ongoing arbitration proceedings. Individually, they generated the usual case-specific commentary. But read together, they tell a bigger story: The Second Circuit is done treating arbitration agreements as a special category of contract that gets the benefit of the doubt. Going forward, they will be evaluated like any other agreement.

The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau's revised Section 1071 final rule introduces substantial changes to small business lending data collection requirements, including a dramatically increased coverage threshold and narrowed scope. This comprehensive discussion examines whether these modifications still achieve Congress's fair lending objectives while exploring the operational challenges, competitive opportunities, and potential risks that lenders must navigate before the January 2028 compliance deadline.

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act prohibits certain types of “calls,” including telemarketing calls, to numbers listed on the national Do Not Call Registry. (This obligation lives at 47 USC § 227(c)(5).) The Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”) and, until recently, nearly all courts following the FCC have interpreted “calls” to include text messages.

On June 15, New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill and Attorney General Jennifer Davenport announced a statewide initiative to crack down on consumer “junk fees” through tighter regulation and enforcement. The announcement is the latest state-level effort to expand consumer protection amid the federal pullback at agencies like the CFPB.

This comprehensive newsletter covers recent federal and state consumer protection enforcement actions, including FTC lawsuits against dietary supplement companies and mortgage relief operators, multi-state settlements involving COVID-19 testing businesses, and new regulatory initiatives like California's Affordability Response Team.

The Eastern District of Tennessee denied a plaintiff's request to defer summary judgment in a TCPA case, while the Seventh Circuit expressed skepticism about whether text messages qualify as "calls" under the statute.

As recently predicted in our May 8, 2026 blog, a new cert petition was filed on May 22, 2026 in Cantero v. Bank of America, asking the U.S. Supreme Court to revisit, again, the increasingly important question...

A Colorado lawsuit challenges a donor-advised fund sponsor's decision to suspend advisory privileges over a $21 million fund, raising critical questions about the legal enforceability of donor advisory rights that families...

Virginia's new amendments to its auto-renewal subscription law mandate that businesses make cancellation at least as easy as sign-up, introducing strict channel-symmetry requirements that eliminate good-faith compliance protections.