Category Archives: Consumer Law
Allyson Gold, ‘Asymmetrical Tenancies’
ABSTRACT Tenant screening reports are a standard feature of the rental application process. These reports provide landlords with comprehensive histories on prospective tenants’ civil court records (with an emphasis on eviction filings), credit history, and criminal records. While the reports are touted as tools to help landlords mitigate risk involved in tenant selection, the reality […]
Mateusz Grochowski, ‘The Phantom Consumer in Louisiana Civil Law’
ABSTRACT The paper examines the conceptual structure and historical roots of consumer protection in Louisiana civil law, treating it as a particular instance of a mixed system emerging at the crossroads of European civil law traditions and US market-oriented policy. Although Louisiana lacks a comprehensive consumer protection system, its elements have emerged through what the […]
‘Comparative AI Law: Regulating the Future’ – special issue of German Law Journal
Comparative AI Law: Regulating the Future, German Law Journal volume 26, special issue 7, October 2025. Of particular interest for private law are: AI-Driven Dynamic Pricing: Erosion of Consumer Welfare, Invisible Hand, and Rise of Platform Quasi-Taxation (Sang Yop Kang) Digital Alchemy? Rethinking Copyright in the Age of AI-Generated Content: Lessons and Reflections from the […]
Chen, Kutin and Russell, ‘Buy Now Pay Later and Its Intersection with Family Violence: Prevalence and Prevention’
ABSTRACT Buy Now Pay Later (‘BNPL’) has gained traction particularly among young Australians as a smart, interest-free ‘way to pay’. Yet, digitalisation, easy access to credit, and the lack of friction have heightened the risks of financial abuse. Coerced BNPL debt continues to increase, and survivors’ attempts to extricate themselves from such debt are fraught […]
Ayelet Sela, ‘Technologies of Mass Arbitration’
ABSTRACT Mass arbitration has rapidly emerged as a novel, fast-growing, and highly contested development in the contemporary US dispute resolution landscape. Existing scholarship explains its rise through Federal Arbitration Act jurisprudence, claiming economics, and strategic responses to class action waivers. This Article identifies a critical and underexplored fourth driver: technology. It argues that mass arbitration […]
Riccardo Serafin, ‘The Road(s) to a Sustainable Contract Law: Three Approaches and Some Remaining Doubts’
ABSTRACT The idea of incorporating environmental sustainability into modern contract law is gaining traction. However, the feasibility of the project as a whole and the concrete changes needed remain largely unsettled and only incompletely explored. The present article contributes to the debate by identifying and critically analysing three strategies (top-down, bottom-up and nudging) to integrate […]
‘Consumer class action regime would be a major shift in the litigation landscape’
The government is exploring a new opt-out class action regime for consumer law claims in England and Wales. This would be a major shift in the litigation landscape, as the first ‘true’ class action for claims of this type. It has kicked off a Law Commission review to assess whether enforcement of consumer law could […]
Russell Opland, ‘Consumer Protection Law in New Zealand: A Means of Redress for Privacy Harms?’
ABSTRACT This paper interrogates the growing dissonance between New Zealand’s digital economy and its frameworks for consumer redress. It identifies a significant regulatory ‘void’ within the Privacy Act 2020, arguing that the Act’s conciliatory enforcement pathway and high remedial ‘harm threshold’ – requiring ‘significant humiliation’ or ‘loss of dignity’ – create an insurmountable barrier for […]
Maria Bhatti, ‘Islamic finance, law, and women’s financial inclusion in Australia’
ABSTRACT Muslim women in Australia experience layered forms of financial exclusion shaped by the intersection of gender, religion, migration, race, and socio-economic position. These intersecting dynamics are reinforced by Australia’s secular, market-oriented financial system, which offers limited regulatory recognition of Islamic financial principles. This article undertakes a doctrinal and regulatory analysis of Islamic finance in […]
Petra Weingerl, ‘The notion of consumer in EU law: between traditional concepts and digital realities’
ABSTRACT The digital market poses significant challenges to the traditional conception of EU consumer law. This article adopts a foundational perspective, focusing on the core question underlying the consumer-law framework: who is the consumer worthy of protection? In traditional consumer transactions, the binary distinction between ‘consumer’ and ‘trader’ has generally been clear. In digital markets, […]