Category Archives: Consumer Law
Vidhi Nawal, ‘Licensing Agreements and Consumer Interests’
ABSTRACT Licensing agreements have become the most prevalent way of controlling access to digital commodities and services. Not anymore do consumers own the items bought; rather, consumers receive licenses from sellers, allowing them to use the products via contract-based relations. While licensing agreements are very helpful and useful for innovations, for protecting intellectual property rights, […]
Bruce Wardhaugh, ‘Ticket touting, moral outrage and political opportunism: how not to protect consumers’
ABSTRACT On 31 August 2024, tickets for the Oasis reunion tour went on sale. The outcome was predictable. Prospective purchasers waited online for hours to buy tickets, many were disappointed. Tickets soon appeared on secondary sites at prices which greatly exceeded originally advertised prices. The resulting outcries fed into the new Government’s manifesto promise to […]
Jaafar Noor, ‘The Fourth Fictitious Commodity: Data Brokers, the Consumer Category, and the Commodification of Personhood in American Privacy Law’
ABSTRACT This paper argues that American privacy law’s reliance on the legal category ‘consumer’ is not a regulatory gap but the operative legal mechanism by which lived experience is constituted as a fictitious commodity. Drawing on Karl Polanyi’s analysis of fictitious commodities in The Great Transformation, the paper theorizes personhood as the fourth fictitious commodity […]
Nadav Shoked, ‘American Courts’ Image of a Tenant’
ABSTRACT What is the core of current American residential landlord-tenant law, and how was that core formed? This Essay argues that in the past few decades courts have settled on a two-pronged landlord–tenant law regime. The law provides tenants with assurances respecting the quality of the units they rent. It does not, conversely, provide them […]
Vivien Chen, ‘Buy Now and Pay Later and Its Latent Risks’
ABSTRACT Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) has been lauded as one of the latest global trends in smart ‘ways to pay’, riding on the wave of digital disruption that has gained traction internationally. At the same time, concerns have been raised over harm to vulnerable consumers becoming mired in unanticipated debt. This article facilitates a […]
O’Brien and Ali, ‘“An Increasingly Middle-Class Phenomenon”: The Causes and Impacts of Financial Hardship in Australia’
ABSTRACT Since the 1980s, the ‘financialisation’ of everyday life has transformed the way consumers manage their money. Credit has assumed a central role in the economy and has become an accepted means of funding consumption. During this period, rates of personal insolvency have increased significantly. This phenomenon has not been limited to low-income groups but […]
‘Specifying a Fourth Integrity: A European Constitutional Method for the Digital Fairness Act’
The European Digital Fairness Act (DFA), which the Commission will table at the end of 2026 under the portfolio of Michael McGrath, is being drafted in the grammar of consumer protection. For adults, that grammar holds. For children, it is the wrong category. A child cannot meaningfully consent to the architectural shaping of the very […]
Chinglong Lim, ‘Regulating Unfair Terms in Standard-Form Contracts: A Comparative Study of French and Cambodian Law’
ABSTRACT This article examined the regulation of unfair contract terms in Cambodian consumer law through a comparative analysis with French and European Union legal frameworks. It focused on the widespread use of standard-form contracts in modern commerce. These contracts have increased concerns about structural imbalances between businesses and consumers, especially in jurisdictions where legal protections […]
Gralf-Peter Calliess, ‘Consumer Contracts under Article 6 Rome I’
ABSTRACT This chapter analyses purpose, scope, legislative history and content of Article 6 of the so called Rome I Regulation (EC/593/2008) on the basis of the normtext, jurisprudence of the CJEU and Member State courts as well as textbooks and law journal articles of leading experts in EU private international law. Calliess, Gralf-Peter, Consumer Contracts […]
Kricheli-Katz and Marotta-Wurgler, ‘The Distributional Costs of Effective Consumer Regulation’
ABSTRACT Disclosure is a cornerstone of consumer protection regulation, yet little is known about its differential effects across consumers. We study how disclosure format influences decision-making across the income distribution, drawing on insights from behavioral research on financial scarcity. Prior work indicates that financial stress can activate a scarcity mindset, narrowing the cognitive resources available […]