Category Archives: Consumer Law
Mark Cooney, ‘How Legalese Jeopardizes Enforceability’
ABSTRACT This article discusses cases in which courts refused to enforce documents bogged down in legalese and poor design. For all its perceived reassurance, precision, or convenience, legalese runs against the law’s grain and comes with increased risk. And that risk grows with every stilted phrase, run-on sentence, word of jargon, or wall of dense […]
Gunawan, Hartzog, Richards, Choffnes, and Wilson, ‘Dark Patterns as Disloyal Design’
ABSTRACT Lawmakers have started to regulate ‘dark patterns’, understood to be design practices meant to influence technology users’ decisions through manipulative or deceptive means. Most agree that dark patterns are undesirable, but open questions remain as to which design choices should be subjected to scrutiny, much less the best way to regulate them. In this […]
‘Freeing the Nonfreehold Estate: Climate Change and Tenant Protections’
Clara Potter and Lauren Godshall, ‘Renting at the Edge of the World: Climate Change Protections Failing Renters’, 74 Washington University Journal of Law and Policy 117 (2024). When teaching property law, professors often reference the historical distinction between the freehold estate and the nonfreehold estate. The nobles held the freehold estates; the peasants held the […]
Jennifer Martin, ‘Sales 2024 Cases’
SCOPE OF ARTICLE 2 Article 2 of the Uniform Commercial Code (‘UCC’) applies to ‘transactions in goods’ and defines ‘goods’ to include all things that are ‘movable at the time of identification to the contract’. Courts tend to read section 2-102 more narrowly than its text by applying Article 2 to present sales of goods […]
Gutsche, Engler, Gleue, Möller and Ziegler, ‘The expressive function of legal norms: Experimental evidence from the Supply Chain Act in Germany’
ABSTRACT Legal norms can have a direct effect on individual behavior through legal enforcement. However, according to the ‘expressive function of law,’ they can also indirectly affect individual behavior by shaping related social norms. Since evidence for this expressive function is scarce, we consider a new law on corporate due diligence for the protection of […]
Levin, Lytton and Rabin, ‘Using State Consumer Protection Law to Advance National Public Health and Environmental Policies’
ABSTRACT State Unfair and Deceptive Acts and Practices (UDAP) statutes – once regarded as niche consumer protection tools – have emerged over the past two decades as powerful policy instruments for addressing urgent public health and environmental challenges. Private parties and government entities have filed UDAP lawsuits aimed at reducing tobacco-related illness, opioid addiction, firearms […]
Call for Papers: ‘Fairness in Digital Contract Law: European and Global Comparative Perspectives’: Kraków, Poland, 4-5 December 2025
The event will serve as a platform for critical engagement with the evolving legal framework applicable to digital contracts in Europe (the EU and national law, Switzerland and the UK), North America and the Asia-Pacific Region, on a national, regional and supranational level. The organisers invite contributions applying doctrinal, comparative, economic, theoretical, philosophical, and empirical […]
‘Vulnerability and Digital Market Law: An Unorthodox View’
In recent years, vulnerability has emerged as one of central concepts in discussions on digital market policy. Its gist is straightforward: while interactions between consumers and firms generate various risks and potential harms, not everyone is equally affected. Certain groups, due to factors such as age, income, or education, are more exposed and may therefore […]
Johannes Ungerer, ‘Legislatively liquidated damages (legiliquids)’
INTRODUCTION In a case of breach of contract, courts commonly award damages to the claimant as compensation for the actual loss caused by the defendant. Yet it can be difficult for the individual claimant to quantify and prove the exact compensatory amount. Occasionally, private parties therefore agree upfront on a contractual clause stipulating liquidated damages […]
Szymon Osmola, ‘Improving the Quality of Consumer Choice: Unfair Terms Directive Revisited’
ABSTRACT This article investigates how the Unfair Terms Directive (UTD) attempts to improve the quality of consumer choice through establishing the extended choice mechanism. The article consists of three parts: analytical, interpretive, and doctrinal. The analytical part explains how the ex post control of contract terms provides consumers with an opportunity to rethink their original, […]