| Volume 124 Number 9 |
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The People’s Lawyer’s Tip of the Day
When it comes to privacy, you don’t have much at work. Don’t say anything in a phone call or email or do anything at your desk that you wouldn’t want your employer to see. Click here for more.
Buying a Soda Now Comes With Another Tax in Philadelphia
Last week, the Philadelphia City Council approved a 1.5-cents-per-ounce tax on sugar-added and artificially sweetened soft drinks. That would add 18 cents to the cost of a can of soda, $1.08 for a six-pack or $1.02 for a two-liter bottle. The new soda tax does not include the additional 8% sales tax that already applies to soda in Pennsylvania. Soda, which is classified as food, is tax exempt in some states, but not in Pennsylvania. The new tax is expected to raise over $90 million per year. Philadelphia joins Berkeley, California as cities with soda taxes. Click here for more.
Your Money
Ever wonder why your bank or credit card company sent you a new card with a chip? EMV, which stands for Europay, MasterCard and Visa, is a global standard for cards equipped with computer chips and the technology used to authenticate chip-card transactions. In response to numerous large-scale data breaches and increasing rates of counterfeit card fraud, U.S. card issuers are migrating to this new technology to protect consumers and reduce the costs of fraud. "If someone copies a mag stripe, they can easily replicate that data over and over again because it doesn't change," says Dave Witts, president of U.S. payment systems for Creditcall, a payment gateway and EMV software developer. Unlike magnetic-stripe cards, every time an EMV card is used for payment, the card chip creates a unique transaction code that cannot be used again. Click here for more.
For the Lawyers
Good faith reliance on law is a bona fide error under Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA). Collector filed a collection lawsuit against Oliva in the first municipal district of the Circuit Court of Cook County. Under the Seventh Circuit’s 1996 Newsom decision, interpreting the FDCPA venue provision, debt collectors were allowed to file suit in any of Cook County’s municipal districts if the debtor resided in Cook County or signed the underlying contract there. While the Oliva suit was pending, the Seventh Circuit overruled Newsom, with retroactive effect (Suesz, 2014). One week later, Blatt voluntarily dismissed the suit. Oliva sued Blatt for violating the FDCPA’s venue provision as newly interpreted by Suesz. The district court granted Blatt summary judgment, finding that it relied on Newsom in good faith and was immune from liability under the FDCPA’s bona fide error defense, 15 U.S.C. 1692k(c), which precludes liability for unintentional violations resulting from a good-faith mistake. The Seventh Circuit affirmed the district court’s decision upholding the collector’s bona fide error defense. The court rejected an argument that the defense should not apply because the firm’s violation resulted from its mistaken interpretation of the law. It found the firm simply followed the circuit's controlling law; its failure to foresee the retroactive change of law was not a mistaken legal interpretation, but an unintentional bona fide error. Oliva v. Blatt, Hasenmiller, Leibsker & Moore, LLC (7th Cir). Click here for more.