More than 200 law professors and other scholars rushed out of the gate to back the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s plan to prohibit arbitration clauses preventing class actions, as the formal comment period on the proposal opened this week, the National Law Review reported yesterday. Calling the proposal “critically important to protect consumers,” the group of 210 professors submitted a letter on Tuesday arguing that class actions complement resource-strained state and federal agencies in enforcing the law. The professors wrote that, by allowing financial-services companies to “eradicate consumer class actions, we are allowing these companies to insulate themselves from enforcement of our laws. This harms not only individual consumers but also the public at large.”
