Category Archives: Consumer Law
Wayne Barnes, ‘Shifting Towards Boilerplate Regulation’
ABSTRACT Consumer assent to standard form contracts has been creating cognitive dissonance among contracts scholars for a century. Businesses impose standard forms on consumers, who never read the terms. But consumers would not understand them if they did. And they don’t have the bargaining power to change them anyway – the terms are famously ‘take […]
Yonathan Arbel, ‘The Readability of Contracts: Big Data Analysis’
ABSTRACT The Plain Language Movement waged a silent revolution in the last generation, passing nearly 800 laws nationwide with little public debate. The movement asserted that it could scientifically show that there is a widespread readability crisis in legal documents, particularly contracts, that are unreadable to most adults. This article presents the largest empirical analysis […]
‘Consumer responsibility to remedy structural injustice: European consumer law’s capitalistic strategy’
Capitalist global processes of production and consumption are unjust. Social movements have been claiming this for decades. Production for private consumption requires an extensive use of natural and finite resources, which we are depleting. Many goods we consume in the European Union are primarily produced outside of the Member States in a manner few would […]
‘Consumer Law, Social and Ecological Justice: Charting the Crossroads’
In 2004, a group of scholars signed a collective work with the evocative title ‘Social Justice in European Contract Law: A Manifesto’. Starting from the idea that private contract law had the potential to shape the future of the European Union, the document aimed to achieve two main objectives: 1. The construction of a European […]
‘Reconfiguring contract law through sustainability’
Though not the centrepiece, sustainability was already on the radar of the Manifesto for Social Justice in European Contract Law in 2004: ‘It is important to align the general principles of social justice that govern the market order with standards designed to protect public goods such as a healthy environment’. Twenty years later, as humanity […]
‘The Making of the Debtor Society: From Affluence to Normalised Indebtedness’
In this contribution, I introduce the concept of a ‘debtor society’ and explore how it reflects broader socio-economic transformations shaped by neoliberal policies and financialisation. Building on Pistor’s (2019) argument that capital is coded in law, I argue that the debtor society is defined by two key elements: the normalisation of indebtedness as a central […]
‘Private Law Fairness between Generations?’
Distributive justice is an essential element of social justice. When discussing distributive justice in private law, one important question is: a fair distribution between whom? For example, is a consumer protection instrument that strengthens the position of societally strong consumers, but is less important for weak ones (like much of the information paradigm), ‘social’? The […]
‘Digital Vulnerability as a Tool for Social Justice in European Private Law’
In recent decades, the concept of vulnerability has emerged in many post-industrial societies to signify the growing fragility of human beings, economies, infrastructures, and ecosystems in the contemporary world. The notion of ‘vulnerable subject’, in particular, has become a powerful and dynamic concept that explains how all individuals, including those who do not belong to […]
Jovana Cicmil, ‘Consumer rights protection and prohibition of unfair business practices with the aim of improving consumer needs and demands satisfaction’
ABSTRACT A characteristic feature of contemporary business and current trends in the market economy is primarily globalization, which has significantly enhanced the possibilities for expanding operations from one market to multiple markets, while simultaneously increasing competitiveness among business entities. Consumer protection in developed market economies is not a new topic; however, under the conditions of […]
‘Protection of the “Vulnerable” Consumers in the Neurotechnology’
Digital technology is being integrated into our daily lives and personal spheres and soon it will be part of our bodies. For instance, advancements in neurotechnology include brain imaging and the manipulation of brain activity through neural devices, as part of the diagnoses and treatment of several psychiatric and neurological conditions. However, these technologies are […]