Category Archives: Consumer Law
Joseph Spooner, ‘Debt relief as climate policy: the role of personal insolvency law’
ABSTRACT Climate impacts extend beyond physical destruction to include widespread financial distress. This article explores the role that debt relief policies – particularly personal insolvency or bankruptcy law – might play within a range of measures to raise the capacity of individuals to withstand climate-related shocks. Through the cancellation of unpayable debt, personal insolvency acts […]
Julian Jonker, ‘Stability in Contract’
ABSTRACT Contract law involves the public and therefore coercive enforcement of private claims. The coercive nature of contract consists in the fact that contract enforcement goes beyond acknowledgement that the underlying claims are binding. This coercive element stands in need of justification. This Article develops a justificatory criterion of reflexive adequacy: contract law doctrine that […]
Christina Lee, ‘Protecting Consumers in the Interactions Behind AI Agents’
ABSTRACT This Essay shines a light on a challenge created by the rapid mainstreaming of AI agents for consumer use. An AI agent’s value proposition is that they can, without explicit user intervention, perform tasks and actions to the user’s benefit. Delivering on this proposition often requires that the AI agent transact with third parties […]
Lagioia, Jabłonowska, Liepina and Drazewski, ‘AI in Search of Unfairness in Consumer Contracts: The Terms of Service Landscape’
ABSTRACT This article explores the potential of artificial intelligence for identifying cases where digital vendors fail to comply with legal obligations, an endeavour that can generate insights about business practices. While heated regulatory debates about online platforms and AI are currently ongoing, we can look to existing horizontal norms, especially concerning the fairness of standard […]
Hai-Anh Tran and others, ‘Life Is a Pressure Cooker: How and Why Stress Directs Consumers to Act Unethically’
ABSTRACT Unethical consumer behavior, such as deceptive product returns, digital piracy, shoplifting, and falsifying online reviews, is a growing concern with significant economic and ethical implications. However, its psychological antecedents remain underexplored. This research investigates the role of stress as a key driver of unethical consumer behavior, offering a novel perspective on why consumers engage […]
Richard Frankel, ‘The Mass Arbitration Illusion’
ABSTRACT Mass arbitration has emerged as the latest battleground in the ongoing tug-of-war between corporations and their consumers and employees regarding binding mandatory arbitration clauses. After businesses succeeded in shielding themselves from liability by using mandatory arbitration clauses to ban class actions, plaintiffs struck back. By filing large numbers of individual arbitrations against a corporate […]
Travis Gilly, ‘Never a User: The Third Party the Consent Apparatus cannot see’
ABSTRACT Contemporary governance of consumer artificial intelligence is keyed almost entirely to the user: the person who opened the application, accepted the terms, and can therefore be said to have agreed. That keying is not a drafting habit. It is the load-bearing assumption of the whole apparatus, and it produces a structural blind spot rather […]
Abraham and Baker, ‘Five Sober Prescriptions for Homeowners Insurance’
ABSTRACT In this Article, we offer five sober prescriptions for homeowners insurance. The prescriptions have the virtue of being capable of implementation, having the potential to mitigate the homeowners insurance crisis, and not depending on unrealistic assumptions about policyholders, regulators, or markets. We are not suggesting that merely by snapping one’s fingers, these prescriptions can […]
Infantino and Crea, ‘Digital Vulnerability for All?’
ABSTRACT What if we took seriously the idea recently put forward by many institutions and scholars that, in online interactions, all human beings are vulnerable or made more vulnerable than ordinary? What if our regulatory infrastructures acknowledged that the vast majority of us, even in the hyperconnected societies of the Global North, have little understanding […]
Jose Gonzalez, ‘Moving Targets: Promissory Instability in the Pricing and Access Terms of Generative AI Subscription Services (2024-2026)’
ABSTRACT Between October 2024 and July 2026, the leading commercial providers of generative artificial intelligence repeatedly modified the pricing, usage limits, and access terms of subscription services after consumers had already paid for them. This paper documents that pattern through a rapid multiple-case documentary analysis of four providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Moonshot AI), drawing […]