Category Archives: Consumer Law
Haward Soper, ‘Long leasehold “management packs” – use and abuse’
ABSTRACT In almost every case a long leaseholder selling their leasehold interest will have to provide the buyer with what is known in the industry as a ‘management pack’. These packs contain information about the property and about property management and the relationship between the parties to the lease. Of around 1,500,000 property sales each […]
C Haward Soper, ‘Service Charge Budget – To Consult or Not to Consult?’
ABSTRACT This article examines whether freeholders should be legally required to consult long-leaseholders on service charge budgets before imposing and collecting charges. Using empirical survey data – both qualitative and quantitative – alongside doctrinal analysis and theoretical insights from management studies, I argue in favour of such a requirement. Additionally, I draw upon my experience […]
‘Remembering Guido Alpa’: King’s College London, 29 July 2025
A one day conference addressed to practitioners, teachers, students and researchers of law focusing on developments in consumer law across jurisdictions in the context of technological innovations including artificial intelligence … (more, registration)
Call for Papers: ‘The Ascension of Contract’: Conference on Contract, Consumer, and Commercial Law (C³), University of British Columbia, 5-6 November 2025
The conference aims to bring together scholars, as well as practitioners, regulators, and policymakers whose work has a nexus to contracts, including those working in contract law, consumer law, commercial law, property and private law. Sponsored by Allard’s Centre for Business Law, the theme of the 2025 conference is ‘The Ascension of Contract: Understanding the […]
Rebecca Stone, ‘A Democratic Conception of Consumer Contracts’
ABSTRACT I sketch and briefly evaluate two standard ways of conceptualizing the problem that is posed by consumer contracts and defend a third view, which is based on my democratic conception of contract. According to the first, the power asymmetry between sellers and consumers means that we should not view consumer contracts as genuine contracts […]
Mariana Valente, ‘Terms of Service as a Case of Legal Pluralism’
ABSTRACT While discussions involving free speech often revolve around individual rights against the government, recent developments in technologies related to the Internet raise questions regarding new forms of censorship practiced by private Internet service providers. Past experiences, such as the movie pictures private regulation by the Production Code, illustrate how private agreements and practices can […]
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 […]
Paterson, Tan and Webb, ‘Generative AI in Small Value Consumer Disputes: Reviving Not Resolving Challenges of Design and Governance in Online Dispute Resolution’
ABSTRACT This article examines the benefits and risks of generative AI use in an important domain that is currently under-serviced by the civil justice system: small value consumer claims, where generative AI has been proposed as a means of closing the access to justice gap. In the field of online dispute resolution (‘ODR’), use has […]
Tommaso Fia, ‘Unfair Terms Review in the Data Act: An Effective Means for Institutionalising Data (Markets)?’
ABSTRACT This paper critically assesses the core components, rationales and functioning of unfair terms control in B2B data-related transactions (art 13 Data Act). In doing so, it situates this tool within the most common contractual trends characterising data markets, and gauges its ultimate role for what Elaine Fahey termed ‘data institutionalisation’ in the EU. First, […]
Ingeborg Gruenwald, ‘Conference Report “Remedies to Digital Vulnerability in European Private Law” (DiVE)’
INTRODUCING DiVE Unpredictability, control, and autonomy. It is precisely at this junction that resides Artificial Intelligence (AI). Roughly a century back, Huxley and Orwell cautioned the world against excessive technological reliance. However, the present landscape suggests that in some ways we are in the midst of living the two aforementioned prophecies; with learning increasingly becoming […]