Category Archives: Consumer Law
Tom Bouwman, ‘Not all consumers are the same: how is the differentiation between consumers operationalised in EU consumer law?’
ABSTRACT European Union (EU) consumer law is rather one-size-fits-all, meaning that it largely disregards differences between consumers and their protection needs. Consequently, there is underprotection, which can not only harm the internal market but is also at odds with the EU’s commitment to ensuring a high level of consumer protection. To be able to propose […]
Christopher Chao-hung Chen, ‘Regulating Consumer Contracts with Government-made Templates: An Examination of Taiwan’s Approach to Boilerplate Forms’
ABSTRACT This article examines Taiwan’s approach of using government-issued contractual templates to regulate unfair terms in standard forms for consumer transactions. This article studies user agreements from a sample of two different types of electronic payment service providers (PSPs) in Taiwan, one operating under a more stringent regulatory framework and the other subject to lighter […]
Möllers and Glas, ‘Paying for Returns in Distance Contracts: Rethinking Consumer Protection Law’
ABSTRACT In Germany, one fourth of all goods bought online are returned to the retailer; for clothing, the figure is up to 75%. Whether the legislator had numbers like these in mind when he introduced the right of withdrawal almost 30 years ago seems doubtful. Its legal basis, the Consumer Rights Directive and its predecessor, […]
Conaglen and Sherry, ‘Equitable High-Density Housing: Fiduciary Duties in Developer-Negotiated Body Corporate Contracts’
ABSTRACT Strata title apartments constitute a significant and growing segment of the Australian housing market and have increasingly been the subject of consumer complaint. A particular source of concern are contracts between bodies corporate and service providers when housing developers have played a role in the contract’s negotiation and formation. By analogy with company promoters, […]
Paul Accornero, ‘From Corporate Misalignment to Market Failure: The Convergence Parallel and AI Governance in Sales and Marketing Systems’
ABSTRACT While AI safety discourse fixates on speculative superintelligence risks, commercial AI systems deployed today in sales and marketing already exhibit the instrumental convergence behaviors that researchers warn about. This paper introduces the ‘Convergence Parallel’ framework, demonstrating structural homologies between corporate optimization and AI safety concerns. Through analysis of algorithmic price discrimination, manipulative interface design, […]
Tola Amodu, ‘Hope in Property (or The “Hopefulness” of Property)?’
ABSTRACT Hope is arguably a basis for understanding law broadly defined and has utility in shaping expectations or at least anchoring the ‘not yet’. In this way hope becomes the intercessor between aspiration and realization; one of the accepted functions of the law. Property law broadly defined, remains primarily a response to individual claims. Yet […]
Joaquín Sarrión, ‘The Access to Justice of Consumers in the Current European Union Legal System: Challenges and Perspectives’
ABSTRACT The effectiveness of the protection of EU consumer rights, through the access to justice, is mostly based in the application and resolution of EU member States jurisdictions. Nevertheless, the effectiveness has been largely guaranteed by CJEU case law. The access to justice, in the EU jurisdiction centralized level for legal and natural persons, including […]
Emanuele Scattarreggia, ‘AI-Driven Smart Contracts: Enhancing Consumer Protection or Exacerbating Consumer Protection Challenges?’
ABSTRACT The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into smart contracts holds the potential to both enhance and exacerbate consumer protection challenges. Since the AI system embedded within the contract’s code enables a high degree of contractual personalisation – by tailoring the legal agreement to the unique characteristics of the targeted individual consumer, thanks to its […]
Catherine Brown and others, ‘The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Duty and Standard of Care in Legal Practice: A “Disrupting Moment” for Laws That Protect Consumers from Economic Harm?’
ABSTRACT The increasing integration of artificial intelligence (‘AI’) into legal practice introduces a spectrum of automation goals, ranging from systems that merely assist lawyers in decision-making to those that aim to provide fully autonomous legal advice. In particular, the rise of generative conversational artificial intelligence (‘GenAI’), such as ChatGPT, is fundamentally changing the nature of […]
Hansen, Fejős, Zeng and Gentile, ‘Teaching contract law with large language models: refining errorful learning for the digital age’
ABSTRACT This article investigates how the intrinsic fallibility of large language models (LLMs) can enhance the teaching and learning of contract law. Extending errorful learning theory, it conceptualises a new category of AI‑generated yet student‑shaped error and analyses how these mistakes can foster deeper engagement with unfair‑terms doctrine under the Consumer Rights Act 2015. A […]