| Volume 97 Number 1 |
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The People’s Lawyer’s Tip of the Day
A debt collector may call you at work until he or she knows your employer prohibits such calls. Once you tell the debt collector the calls are prohibited, federal law says the calls must stop.
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Obama Calls for NSA Surveillance Reform
Ever since Edward Snowden released information detailing the government's expansive surveillance program, the public has pushed back against the NSA, urging courts and legislators to strip the agency of its wide authority.
The government's collection of telephone metadata is particularly infuriating for many citizens. In essence, the government can comb through bulk data, including everyone with a phone, to find what it's looking for.
Many critics of the program believe it tramples privacy rights and due process. Advocates for the program insist they are necessary and that the media has sensationalized reports.
Last Tuesday, President Obama called on Congress to reform the program. Under his proposal, the phone companies would maintain metadata instead of the government. Additionally, the government would be denied access to the data without judicial approval.
Will legislators limit the expansive authority of the National Security Administration?
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E-Cigarettes Face Heightened Scrutiny
Have you recently quit smoking by switching to electronic cigarettes? These devices, generally made of a battery-based heating element, water, and liquid tobacco, have become very popular for tobacco users hoping to kick the bad habit. Unfortunately, research suggests that the tobacco-free devices could be potentially dangerous.
If taken in high doses, the liquid nicotine found in electronic cigarettes can cause serious illness or even death.
E-cigarettes are not (yet) regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. As a result, manufacturers do not face minimum safety guidelines.
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Best Rewards Cards for Travelers
Are you a frequent traveler? Do you have credit card that awards you for your purchases? If not, you could be throwing money away.
Finding the right card for you can be difficult. There are airline specific credit cards, hotel specific credit cards, general travel cards, and retail cards. Although many of them offer awards, they vary greatly in the value of the award, restrictions, and what it takes to get an award. Knowing it can be difficult to find the right card, experts from ValuePenguin analyzed seventy cards and chose the nine best cards for business travelers.
If you're a frequent traveler and want to get the most bang for your buck, find out how!
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Your Money
Calculate your line of credit!
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For the Lawyers
Circuit court upholds Federal Reserve debit-card transaction fees.
The D. C. Circuit Court reversed a district court’s decision and upheld the debit-card transaction fees regulation enacted by the Federal Reserve.
The court stated:
Combining features of credit cards and checks, debit cards have become not just the most popular noncash payment method in the United States but also a source of substantial revenue for banks and companies like Visa and MasterCard that own and operate debit card networks. In 2009 alone, debit card holders used their cards 37.6 billion times, completing transactions worth over $1.4 trillion and yielding over $20 billion in fees for banks and networks. Concerned that these fees were excessive and that merchants, who pay the fees directly, and consumers, who pay a portion of the fees indirectly in the form of higher prices, lacked any ability to resist them, Congress included a provision in the Dodd-Frank financial reform act directing the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System to address this perceived market failure. In response, the Board issued regulations imposing a cap on the per-transaction fees banks receive and, in an effort to force networks to compete for merchants’ business, requiring that at least two networks owned and operated by different companies be able to process transactions on each debit card. Merchant groups challenged the regulations, seeking lower fees and even more network competition. The district court granted summary judgment to the merchants, concluding that the rules violate the statute’s plain language. We disagree. Applying traditional tools of statutory interpretation, we hold that the Board’s rules generally rest on reasonable constructions of the statute, though we remand one minor issue—the Board’s treatment of so-called transactions-monitoring costs—to the Board for further explanation.
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