Category Archives: Consumer Law
Greg Baltz, ‘Landlord-Tenant Collective Bargaining’
ABSTRACT Amidst a growing affordability crisis, tenant unions organize to secure individual tenant protections, win collective control of housing, and build political power. Tenant unions harness rent strikes and organize across state lines to force landlords to come to the bargaining table absent any federal, state, or local legislative scheme compelling landlords to do so. […]
Esposito, Grochowski, Piron and Sibony, ‘The National Lives of EU Consumer Standards: How Courts Develop the Average and Particularly Vulnerable Consumer and Create the Above-Average Consumer’
ABSTRACT The article explores how national courts interpret the EU average consumer standard and the accompanying concept of ‘particularly vulnerable’ consumers (within the meaning of the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive). It summarises the key findings of a team of national reporters who reviewed case law across 19 jurisdictions, including EU Member States and neighbouring countries […]
von Hein, Vuattoux-Bock and Kock, ‘The CISG and European sales law: Impulses for the notion of consumer and the sale of digital goods’
ABSTRACT This article examines the essential role of a dynamic interpretation of the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG) amid the challenges of digitalization and globalization. Notwithstanding the principle of an autonomous interpretation of the CISG, this comparative article analyses whether lessons from recent European legislative developments – that […]
Aman Gebru, ‘Truthmarks’
ABSTRACT Trademark law is conventionally justified as a tool to protect a consumer’s expectation that a mark represents the source of a product. This goal is achieved mainly by preventing a dishonest competitor from confusing consumers into purchasing a product from a source other than the mark owner. However, trademark law ignores untruthful signaling by […]
Emma Laurie, ‘The Enduring Allure of Neoliberalism: Individualising Responsibility for Housing Costs in the English Private Rental Sector’
ABSTRACT This paper explores how the affordability of rents is addressed in the long-anticipated reform of the English private rental sector (PRS) by the Renters’ Rights Act 2025. The PRS has doubled in size since 2010, acting as a social housing substitute for some households. Its tenants spend the highest proportion of income on housing […]
Patricia De Moraes Paisani Matthey Claudet, ‘Pay or consent to have your data used – the complex intersection between the DMA and data protection rules’
ABSTRACT One of the objectives of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) is to prevent gatekeeper platforms from employing their data advantage to create barriers to new entrants. To achieve that, the DMA uses the concept of GDPR consent in Article 5(2) DMA. While this can be seen as a recognition of the synergy between the […]
Gerard Bruijl, ‘Ownership Without Control: Digital Lock-In and the Emergence of Conditional Ownership in Technological Economies’
ABSTRACT Technological products increasingly combine physical ownership with embedded digital systems that remain under manufacturer control. This development raises important questions regarding the evolving relationship between ownership, institutional authority, and user autonomy. While consumers may legally purchase and possess technologically advanced products, critical operational functions are often governed by proprietary software, diagnostic systems, and restricted […]
‘Litigating Human Rights of the Mind: US Social Media Litigation as a Wake-Up Call for Human Rights’
Last week, two US courts for the first time found Meta and Google (YouTube) liable for inflicting harm on users and for violating consumer protection law. These judgments come at a time when European digital policy is under geopolitical pressure and, at the same time, social media bans for children and adolescents are being discussed […]
Christian Twigg-Flesner, ‘Digital Assistants and Consumer Law – Disruption or Innovation?’
ABSTRACT As there is now a reasonable prospect that some digital assistant applications might become available for consumer use, the question this contribution seeks to ask whether, and to what extent, their arrival will affect UK Consumer Law. Answering this has multiple aspects: first, fundamentally, there it will be necessary to analyse what this development […]
Miriam Cherry, ‘Abuse of Contract: A Proposal for a New Cause of Action’
ABSTRACT With the growth of online commerce and the platform economy, many companies are including provisions in their online terms and conditions that extend far beyond what reasonable consumers would expect. Some terms and conditions purport to bind customers to separate contracts in future transactions that have little to do with the first contract. Other […]