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Talk about a bad hair day. Louisiana beauty salon owner Charmaine LeDeux has a loan shark on her tail, and Raoul Lanier, the six-foot-three hunk of testosterone she thought she divorced, has just delivered a bombshell: They're still married! At least the rundown ranch they've inherited together is the perfect hideout. It's hard enough for Raoul to play cowboy to a bunch of scrawny steer, let alone suffer the exquisite torture of living with the delectable Charmaine, who's declared herself a born-again virgin. What's a man crazy with desire to do? With the moon shining over the bayou, this Cajun cowboy must sweet-talk his way into his wife's arms again...before she unties the knot for good!

This Article explores how fintech has disrupted the traditional rent-to-own (RTO) industry, giving rise to new, virtual RTO agreements (VirTOs). These VirTOs have enabled the RTO industry to expand into the service industry and to markets for products not traditionally associated with rentals, such as vehicle repairs, pet ownership, and medical devices. This Article analyzes this development. RTO agreements purport to rent products to a consumer until the conclusion of a set number of renewable rental payments, at which point ownership transfers. The fundamental characteristic of these agreements-and the reason why they are not regulated as loans-is that the consumer is able to terminate the rental agreement without penalty at any time by returning the merchandise to the rental company. RTO agreements are an extremely high-cost form of financing that were traditionally offered through brick-and-mortar stores, like Aaron's or Rent-A-Center, to low-income, subprime consumers who could not obtain traditional credit. The introduction of fintech, however, has shifted the RTO business model from traditional one-stop-shop, brick-and-mortar stores to partnerships between VirTO companies and retailers. As this Article explains, these new VirTOs have different attributes from traditional RTO agreements. In a VirTO, a third-party VirTO provider purchases the desired product from a brick-and-mortar retailer and then rents the product back to the consumer. The entire transaction between the retailer and VirTO company occurs online and unbeknownst to the consumer. This business model has allowed VirTOs to emerge in a variety of specialized markets and services. Not only are these agreements a high-cost method to ownership, but consumers often do not understand the agreements. Although VirTOs purport to be rentals, it is nearly impossible for a consumer to return a rental financed with a VirTO. Because the items rented with VirTOs are not practical to return, this Article argues that VirTOs are not, in fact, RTO agreements. Instead, VirTOs are a sophisticated form of disguised credit. This Article demonstrates that the VirTO industry is a legal fiction designed to avoid consumer protection statutes governing credit. Accordingly, courts should treat VirTOs as credit subject to state usury and federal consumer protection laws. This Article also proposes a series of policy recommendations to regulate VirTOs and to ban such agreements for services and nonsensical products, like vehicle repairs and pets. The policy solutions proposed in this Article provide a model for potential strategies to protect low-income and subprime consumers from the most extreme abuses as fringe financing industries grapple with the introduction of fintech.

After being diagnosed with lung cancer, Roy Cady kills the men hired by his loan shark boss to kill him, and flees to Galveston, Texas, with a prostitute and her young sister, where they face more problems.

The primary effect of Elizabeth Jolley's novel The Newspaper of Claremont Street is a denial of any lasting Aboriginal presence on Australian Land. It produces this effect by \"filling the space\" of potential Aboriginality with a universalized presentation of the archaic, European, economic antagonism between usury and substance. West contends that the most objectionable thing about The Newspaper of Claremont Street is that its fundamental preoccupation is elevated into myth, making the of the completed novel a powerful instrument of white colonization.

Francis Bacon’sOf Counsel(1625) asserts that ‘Books will speak plain when counsellors blanch.’¹ In other words, a counsellor – even one like Bacon, languishing on the margins of political favour – will find it easier to offer advice to his prince through the medium of the written word. A counsellor can give better advice away from the intimidating presence of his monarch. Bacon’s statement inOf Counselprovides a useful way of reading some of the complexities of theNew Atlantis. It suggests that this scientific utopia might be seen as advice literature directed towards the Stuart monarchy. Bacon’s

Separation is understood as sexual perversion. [Werner Sombart] quotes the well-known passage in Tacitus (certainly no lover of the Jews): \"They neither eat nor intermarry with strangers; they are a people of strong passions, yet they withhold themselves from other men's wives\" (240). Here Sombart offers a \"positive\" reading of Jewish \"consciousness of kind.\" He presents a model of sublimation as the mechanism by which sexuality is turned into profit: by the Law of the Father, the Jews limit their sexual contact even with their own wives, so, as a result, \"enormous funds of energy were prevented from finding an outlet in one direction and they turned to others\" (236-37). This repressed sexual power became economic aggression. Thus the \"incestuous\" Jews intermarried, divided themselves off from the strangers among whom they lived, and exploited them through usury: \"But it may be observed that even in the earliest collection of laws interest was allowed to be taken from `strangers'\" (242). And this means that the Jew (or his surrogate in the system of representations) can be unscrupulous: \"[T] he good Jew must needs draw the conclusion that he is not bound to be so particular in his intercourse with non-Jews\" (245). It is economic intercourse that Sombart means, but it reflects on the transformation of this image that Sombart's repressed Jew becomes the degenerate Jew who is unscrupulous in his sexuality as well as his economic dealings. And these degenerate, modern Jews move easily from the desert to the \"modern city,\" because \"the modern city is nothing else but a great desert, as far removed from the warm earth as the desert is, and like it, forcing its inhabitants to become nomads\" (334). The city becomes the place of incest, of the corrupted and corrupting modern person. (21) On this story see \"'[Wagner] in verjüngten Proportionen...': Wälsungenblut als epische Wagner-Transkription,\" [Thomas Mann] Jahrbuch 7 (1994): 169-85; Alan Levenson, \"Thomas Mann's Wälsungenblut in the Context of the Intermarriage Debate and the `Jewish Question,'\" in Insiders and Outsiders: Jewish and Gentile Culture in Germany and Austria, Dagmar C. G. Lorenz and Gabriele Weinberger, eds. (Detroit, Mich., 1994), 135-43; G. R. Kluge, \"Wälsungenblut oder Halbblut? Zur Kontroverse um die Schlusssätze von Thomas Manns Novelle,\" Neophilologus 76 (1990): 237-55; John Whiton, \"Thomas Mann's `Wälsungenblut': Implications of the Revised Ending,\" Seminar 25 (1989): 3748; Sylvia Wallinger, \"'Und es war kalt in dem silbernen Kerzensaal, wie in dem der Schneekönigin, wo die Herzen der Kinder erstarren': Gesundete Männlichkeit -- gezähmte Weiblichkeit in Thomas Manns Königliche Hoheit und `Wälsungenblut,'\" in Der Widerspenstigen Zahmung: Studien zur bezwungenen Weiblichkeit in der Literatur vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart, Sylvia Wallinger and Monika Jonas, eds. (Innsbruck, 1986), 235-57; Bernd M. Kraske, \"Thomas Manns `Wälsungenblut' -- eine antisemitische Novelle?\" in Thomas Mann: Erzählungen und Novellen, Rudolf Wolff, ed. (Bonn, 1984), 42-66; Hans Rudolf Vaget, \"Sang reserve in Deutschland: Zur Rezeption von Thomas Manns Wälsungenblut,\" The German Quarterly 57 (1984): 363-76; Gail Finney, \"Self-Reflexive Siblings: Incest as Narcissism in Tieck, Wagner, and Thomas Mann,\" The German Quarterly 56 (1983): 243-56; Christine Oertel Sjögren, \"The Variant Ending as a Clue to the Interpretation of Thomas Mann's `Wälsungenblut,'\" Seminar 14 (1978): 97-104; Peter de Mendelssohn, Der Zauberer: Das Leben des deutschen Schriftstellers Thomas Mann (Frankfurt, 1975), 1: 662-73, and Marie Walter, \"Concerning the Affair Wälsungenblut,\" Book Collector 13 (1964): 463-72.

When Elmore Leonard turned his satiric sights on the film industry in 1990 withGet Shorty, a full forty years after he had published his first novel, it came as no surprise. Many of his novels had been made into films and, by his own admission, Leonard has been writing novels with the movies in mind for quite some time. He has also been referencing film history in his novels for just as long. Leonard began as a writer of Western pulp stories in the fifties and left his copywriting job once he had sold enough to support his family.

The family barely had settled in with the DeLanceys at Heathcote Hill before Cooper was off again. This time he was bound to the village of Williamstown or Cooper’s Falls in St. Lawrence County, where, in the latest and most complex of their joint operations, he and his cousin Courtland recently had established a general store. Courtland handled the retail operation and related undertakings (a small potash facility, for one) and spent some time hounding the settlers who owed Cooper money on lands in DeKalb and nearby Bangor. For his part, Cooper provided the store’s major financial backing, probably using

Cooper had conceivedLionel Lincolnwith grand ambitions sometime in 1823, perhaps as early as the summer, and had done much more by way of preparation for this book’s narrative than he had done with any previous one (see Chapter 13). Once it finally was published in February 1825, however, the book fell flat. For the first time sincePrecaution,no quick second edition was called for; indeed, Wiley still had nearly a quarter of his six-thousand copy first edition on hand in the later part of the year (LLCE xxiii). Fortunately enough for his sensibilities, Cooper was out

La canonistica bolognese degli ultimi tre decenni del secolo XIII rappresenta un promettente campo di indagine. Si tratta di personaggi ancora poco noti o del tutto oscuri, senz’altro minori rispetto ai giganti della generazione precedente come Sinibaldo dei Fieschi e l’Ostiense, o a più celebri contemporanei come Guglielmo Durante, o a maestri, come Guido da Baisio, le cui fortune si prolungano nel secolo XIV. Siamo di fronte, peraltro, a una generazione il cui lavoro ha posto le basi per le elaborazioni dottrinali dell’epoca successiva. Ignorare o trascurare le figure di questi giuristi minori significherebbe ignorare o trascurare una delle linee