A Powerful Force for Good

Watchdog ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 72-88
Author(s):  
Richard Cordray

Robust law enforcement is crucial to a fair market. Companies that lie, cheat, or steal take advantage of consumers and the honest companies that they compete against. Congress gave the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau two powerful tools to combat fraudulent, deceptive, and abusive practices by big banks and financial predators. One was the authority to bring public enforcement actions against corporate violators, and the other was to send supervisory teams into the companies themselves, to inspect and monitor how they treat consumers. This chapter tells how the bureau developed and combined these tools and then used them to put over $12 billion back in the pockets of consumers who had been wronged. It also discusses how the bureau used supervisory oversight and enforcement actions to prevent or halt systematic ongoing abuses such as deceptive marketing of credit card add-on products and discriminatory auto lending.

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Matthew D. Hilchey ◽  
Matthew Osborne ◽  
Dilip Soman

Abstract Regulators require lenders to display a subset of credit card features in summary tables before customers finalize a credit card choice. Some jurisdictions require some features to be displayed more prominently than others to help ensure that consumers are made aware of them. This approach could lead to untoward effects on choice, such that relevant but nonprominent product features do not factor in as significantly. To test this possibility, we instructed a random sample of 1615 adults to choose between two hypothetical credit cards whose features were shown side by side in tables. The sample was instructed to select the card that would result in the lowest financial charges, given a hypothetical scenario. Critically, we randomly varied whether the annual interest rates and fees were made visually salient by making one, both, or neither brighter than other features. The findings show that even among credit-savvy individuals, choice tends strongly toward the product that outperforms the other on a salient feature. As a result, we encourage regulators to consider not only whether a key feature should be made more salient, but also the guidelines regarding when a key feature should be displayed prominently during credit card acquisition.


Laws ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 30
Author(s):  
Alexander V. Demin

The principle of certainty of taxation is the dimension of a general requirement of certainty in the legal system. The purpose of this article is to argue the thesis that uncertainty in tax law is not always an absolute evil, sometimes it acts as a means of the most optimal (and in some cases the only possible) settlement of relations in the field of taxes. On the contrary, uncertainty and fragmentation in tax law are colossal problems subject to overcome by the efforts of scientists, legislators, judges, and practicing lawyers. Uncertainty in tax law is manifested in two ways: on the one hand, negatively—as a defect (omission) of the legislator and, on the other hand, positively—as a set of specific legal means and technologies that are purposefully used in lawmaking and law enforcement. In this context, relatively determined legal tools are an effective channel for transition from uncertainty to certainty in the field of taxation. A tendency towards increased use of relatively determined legal tools in lawmaking processes (for example, principles, evaluative concepts, judicial doctrines, standards of good faith and reasonableness, discretion, open-ended lists, recommendations, framework laws, silence of the law, presumptive taxation, analogy, etc.), and involving various actors (courts, law enforcement agencies and officials, international organizations, citizens, organizations and their associations) allow making tax laws more dynamic flexible, and adequate to changing realities of everyday life.


Author(s):  
Mavhungu Abel Mafukata

Since Sub-Saharan Africa's first independence in Ghana, the region has experienced massive and costly political and bureaucratic corruption within public service and administration. The causes of the corruption, its nature and form are wide and intertwined. In Sub-Saharan Africa, efforts to curb corruption have failed to discard it. The paper focused on the period from Nkruma in Ghana to Mutharika the 2nd in Malawi. This paper reviewed existing literature on political and bureaucratic corruption in Sub-Saharan Africa while on the other hand the paper employed key informant interviews to gather the required data to investigate, analyse and profile the genesis and evolution of corruption in Sub-Saharan Africa. The key informant interviews were employed to solicit public views and opinion from nineteen key informant participants (n=19) selected from 11 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. The paper found that corruption is legendary; has entrenched itself to becoming some sort of culture in the region, and has become the most difficult socio-economic challenge to resolve in the region despite the various anti-corruption efforts employed by stakeholders to curb it. It emerged through the study that law-enforcement efforts against corruption need some reinforcement in order to be effective and eficient in uprooting corruption in the region. If Sub-Saharan Africa fails to address its corruption challenge, its development prospects would seriously curtailed.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fernando Miró Llinares

The use of predictive AI tools to improve decision-making in relation to crime prevention and investigation is a reality. They are being implemented almost before we fully understand how they work, while we make relevant legal decisions that may determine the progress of the technology, and long before we can predict their full impact. This paper addresses the attitudes towards this technological revolution applied to criminal justice, focusing in particular on its use by police. The first section summarises and describes the techniques and technologies that make up predictive policing. Subsequently, the main part of the study analyses the attitudes with which this technology has been received. These range from the optimism of those who defend its immediate implementation as a way to improve police objectivity and efficiency, to the pessimism of those who see its use as strengthening a dystopia of state control and surveillance. Two apparent extremes that correspond to the transition from optimism to technological pessimism of the twentieth century. The article concludes with a defence of a realistic, critical and informed view of the use of these predictive algorithms. A vision that, on the one hand, accepts that there are no neutral technologies, yet does not fall into fatalism and technophobia; and, on the other hand, places the human being and the legitimate police function at the centre of the algorithmic equation while redefining its objectives based on the scientific evidence applied to each individual technology.


2021 ◽  
pp. 64-85
Author(s):  
Artur Ghambaryan

The aim of the article is to reveal the collisional relationship between justice and the law in the philosophical dimension. The main objectives of the article are to analyze the contradictions between law from the point of view of broad legal understanding, as well as the answer to the question of how law enforcement agent should act if, in solving a specific case, an outrageous contradiction between law and justice is encountered. The author used a number of scientific methods, in particular, historical-legal-comparative methods. The author concludes that supporters of a broad legal understanding consider the issue of contradiction between law mainly from the point of view of legislative policy, however, they do not discuss the issue of how the law enforcement agent should act when an obvious contradiction between law is encountered in a particular case. In the article the sayings «dura lex sed lex» (The law [is] harsh, but [it is] the law) and «lex iniusta non est lex» (An unjust law is no law at all) are considered in the dimensions of the legalism and natural law. The author concludes that the Radbruch formula is an exception to the saying «dura lex sed lex» (The law [is] harsh, but [it is] the law), which has undergone practical approbation. On the one hand, this resolution values the certainty and stability of the law, and on the other hand, it protects the person (society) from the unjustly shouting unjust laws.


Watchdog ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 219-228
Author(s):  
Richard Cordray

This chapter argues that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau presents a model for how government can serve all Americans, helping remedy individual injustices and correct larger distortions in our market economy. Providing support to consumers—ranging from financial education to law enforcement to setting regulations that reform dysfunctional practices in the marketplace—contributes to individual well-being and strengthens families. As fully two-thirds of our economic output is consumer driven, shoring up consumers and imposing sensible regulations to curb excesses of corporate power make the economy sounder and more resilient. People are anxious about the future, and they feel the indignity of corporate indifference when their legitimate concerns are ignored or dismissed. If people lose faith in government’s ability to stand up to powerful special interests, their alienation threatens to destabilize a broad and empowered middle class. Promoting and safeguarding a marketplace that serves consumers—all Americans—is essential to our democracy.


2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aastha Behl ◽  
Pratima Sheorey ◽  
Abhinav Pal ◽  
Ajith Kumar Vadakki Veetil ◽  
Seema R Singh

With the advent of technology and with growing occupancy of the people towards it, online shopping has become the need of the hour. With heavy discounts floating over the e-commerce websites, customers find that online shopping allows them to save both time and money. The e-commerce websites on the other hand seek to avail the early advantage of the frequently visited customers through the recommendation engines by using gamification techniques. This tends to make their products highly attractive with the least cost paid by them along with facilities of extra discounts given to debit/credit card holders. This article provides a coherent picture in the research that has taken place in the area of gamification by comprehensively reviewing 1073 research studies extracted from the SCOPUS database and mostly validates the findings on the effectiveness of gamification in the various fields. This article also peer reviews the various motivating factors that makes customers prefer gamified online shopping over market retailers. The review points out the effects of gamification in e commerce websites in gaining customer retention. The article would also suggest the future of research directions in the field of research of gamification and further research that can be explored in the field.


Author(s):  
Emre Yildirim

The main purposes of this research are (1) to reveal the virtual credit card (VCC) awareness of online shoppers and (2) to prepare a to do list for managers and relevant institutions to provide a more secured internet shopping process by enhancing the trust perception of consumers. To this end, a structured questionnaire consists of three sections was designed and conducted during the period April-May 2018 in Turkey. The findings achieved show that online shoppers mostly attach importance to the recognition of the website, which means they seek trust in online shopping process. On the other hand, they mostly use credit and debit cards, which may make consumers encounter serious fraud issues. VCC usage is only 4.9% in general although VCC awareness is 55.1%. This low level of VCC awareness is associated with education level and the information provided by the financial banks.


1969 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 377-386 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sol Rubin

The decisions of the appellate courts are a vital part of the environment in which law enforcement and correction must function. The reactions of administrators in these fields to the decisions are, to a considerable extent, a matter of choice. The choices may be labeled provocative, defensive, or positive. The defensive position looks like the easiest one to take but may, in the long run, pose more difficulties than the positive reaction. The positive response is "right" in that it works better than the other responses toward advancing correctional practice.


1992 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miriam Gur-Arye

Criminal law defences may be classified as either “justification” or “excuse”. A justification negates the wrongfulness of the conduct. The following are considered justifications: law enforcement, self-defence and lesser evils. An excuse, on the other hand, negates only the culpability of the actor for wrongful conduct. Under special circumstances, such as extreme pressure, it is considered unfair to blame the actor for the violation of the norm. Insanity and duress are typical excuses.


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