Ted Mermin
Director
CLICC is led by Ted Mermin, Director of the Berkeley Center for Consumer Law and Economic Justice, Executive Director of the Public Good Law Center, and a former California Deputy Attorney General. Ted teaches Consumer Protection Law, Comparative Consumer Protection Law, and the Consumer Law & Economic Justice Workshop at the UC Berkeley School of Law; co-convenes with the FTC the four regional California Consumer Protection Partners programs; and runs the nationwide Consumer Law Advocates, Scholars & Students (CLASS) network.
As director of CLICC (and in the years prior to CLICC"s formation), Ted has worked to pass dozens of bills, SB 478 (2023) (effectively ending the use of junk fees in a wide range of industries); AB 1414 (2023) (prohibiting archaic debt collection methods in California); SB 199 (2022) (more than doubling eligibility for civil filing fee waivers); SB 1200 (halving the interest rate of post-judgment debt and restricting renewals of judgment to one 5-year term); AB 1864 (establishing the revamped Department of Financial Protection and Innovation); AB 2463 (2020) (preventing foreclosures for credit card debt); SB 616 (2019) (preventing debt collectors from cleaning out an alleged debtor's bank account); AB 2819 (2016), (restricting release of court records in eviction suits to cases in which tenants are actually evicted). AB 2365 (2014), barring attempts by retailers to prevent consumers from criticizing them or their products (the model for the federal Consumer Review Freedom Act of 2016); and SB 233 (2013), the Fair Debt Buying Practices Act (reforming debt collection in California).
