Jeff Sovern
Professor Jeff Sovern was quoted by Bloomberg News in an article titled Ted Frank: Lightning Rod for Class Settlement Storms. According to the article:
Objectors bring advocacy into an inherently non-adversarial setting, Jeff Sovern, a professor at St. John’s University School of Law, in Jamaica, N.Y., told Bloomberg BNA.
“When parties settle, both sides have a stake in making arguments for approval of the settlement, which means that unless a class member or ‘watchdog’ criticizes a class action settlement, the court may not hear the arguments against it, and the adversary system may not function as it is normally does,” Sovern said in an e-mail.
Sovern was also quoted in a Law360 article, CFPB Pushes Bounds On Using Enforcement As Guidance. That article stated:
There is precedent for agencies using enforcement actions to help define what a statute means.
The FTC, for example, only formalized its guidance for what constituted unfair practices under its UDAP authority in 1980, decades after it was granted the authority to police firms for such actions.
Doing so gave the FTC flexibility to find unfair practices and get a more useful vision of how to prevent them, said Jeff Sovern, a professor at St. John’s University School of Law. And the CFPB is doing something similar, he said.
“When dealing with a relatively new legal standard, like the bureau’s powers to curb abusive acts, it helps to let the law develop for a while before freezing it in a rule like a fly in amber. That way, lawmakers can see how best to interpret the law,” Sovern said.
St. John's University Law Faculty Blog 
Leave a Reply