Category Archives: Consumer Law
Juan Diaz-Granados, ‘Exclusive Possession, “Contractualisation” and the Lease-Licence Dichotomy: A Reconsideration of Legal Categorisation in the Airbnb Era’
ABSTRACT Airbnb is one of the most disruptive companies in the ‘Sharing Economy’. Its business model is built upon a triangular structure of legal relationships that remains poorly understood and inadequately analysed in terms of legal classification. This article examines the issue of legal categorisation vis-à-vis the relationship between the Airbnb host and the Airbnb […]
‘Thumbs Up to Using Visuals in Contracts: How Visuals in Contracts Will Survive Court’
For many legal practitioners, the thought of a visual contract is terrifying. After all, without all the flowery legalese, how will a court know how to interpret the contract? Except that the traditional approach to contract drafting is changing as drafters increasingly focus on clarity. Clarity can come in many forms: plain, uncomplicated language, white […]
Call for Papers: ‘Protecting the Digital Consumer in Asia’, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 16 May 2025
As digital platforms, services and applications are becoming indispensable for everyday life, ensuring that consumers are adequately protected is more critical than ever. This conference aims to bring together legal scholars, practitioners and others to discuss emerging trends of consumer protection law across Asia and beyond. With a focus on private law, we seek to […]
Talia Gillis, ‘“Price Discrimination” Discrimination’
ABSTRACT Credit price personalization, where lenders set prices based on individual borrower and loan characteristics, is a common practice across many loan types. And conventional accounts of its harms focus on the ways in which risk-based pricing, or setting prices based on borrowers’ credit risk, can lead to disparities for protected groups like racial minorities […]
Nadiyah Humber, ‘Corporate-tech Landlordism – The New Era’
ABSTRACT Corporate landlords buy single-family rental homes en masse and employ property technologies to execute fully automated transactions and tenant communication systems. The rapid emergence of corporate landlords is inseverable from the property technologies that power the practice. As such, corporate landlords using property technology to mass acquire and rent single-family homes is referred to […]
Krebs and Bennett Moses, ‘Data Sharing Agreements: Contracting Personal Information In The Digital Age’
ABSTRACT Voluminous information about individuals is being shared every day and everywhere. Streamlining data sharing activities effectively allows public and private entities to use information for policy advancement, knowledge creation and business growth. At the same time, such sharing of personal information also risks harming individuals’ privacy and autonomy. How are data sharing activities governed […]
Sabine Tsuruda, ‘Race, Unconscionability, and Contractual Equality’
ABSTRACT Racially discriminatory contracts should be paradigmatically unconscionable in contract law. The unconscionability doctrine permits a court to refuse to enforce an unfair contract. Classically interpreted, the doctrine narrowly conceptualizes an unfair contract as an extremely nonstandard contract obtained by manipulating or circumventing the disadvantaged party’s decision-making abilities. But racial discrimination can be the market […]
Mateusz Grochowski, ‘Digital Vulnerability in a Post-Consumer Society. Subverting Paradigms?’
ABSTRACT Today’s digital economy is increasingly catering to consumers’ emotions and experiences, providing numerous services to meet these needs. Such services are particularly characteristic of social media platforms, which have based their business models on providing consumers with the infrastructure to express themselves and build social interactions. These shifts in consumer market offerings are part […]
Obar, Gelb, de Jesús, Cavalcante Silva and Palmier Blizzard, ‘Video Notice Design to Support Meaningful Consent Online: An Analysis of Social Media Videos About Artificial Intelligence and Privacy’
ABSTRACT This first AI in Focus report presents research findings about the utility of social media-style video as a supplement to text-based privacy notices. A meaningful consent process online requires that a digital service provider communicate information about services to consumers. For example, information about data collection, algorithms, etc. should be conveyed to help people […]
Sabrina El Sabi, ‘Platform Economy and Its Impact on Vulnerable Digital Consumers. Rethinking the effectiveness of UCTD’
ABSTRACT The rapid proliferation of digitisation processes has exponentially increased the number of international online transactions, including business-to-business (B2B), business-to-consumer (B2C), platform-to-business (P2B) and platform-to-consumer (P2C) relationships. The unlimited economic potential of the Internet for commerce, enables the aggregation and globalisation of markets by offering new opportunities, while also requiring new forms of regulation of […]