Ted Mermin

CLICC is led by Ted Mermin, Interim Director of the Berkeley Center for Consumer Law and Economic Justice, Executive Director of the Public Good Law Center, and former California Deputy Attorney General. Ted currently serves as outside counsel to the East Bay Community Law Center and teaches Consumer Law at the UC Berkeley School of Law. For several years, Ted gathered organizations serving low-income consumers in California into informal legislative coalitions that collectively managed to pass the bills that they proposed. Those successes include SB 233 (2013), the Fair Debt Buying Practices Act; 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); SB 641 (2015), extending consumers’ ability to reopen improper default judgments; SB 501 (2015), placing restrictions on wage garnishment of low-income workers; and AB 2819 (2016), restricting release of court records in eviction suits to cases in which tenants are actually evicted. A brief biography is available here.