Consumer Protection Law Developments

This book reflects the research output of the Committee on the International Protection of Consumers of the International Law Association (ILA). The Committee was created in 2008, with a mandate to study the role of public and private law to protect consumers, review UN Guidelines, and to model laws, international treaties and national legislations concerning protection and consumer redress. It has been accepted to act as an observer not only when the UNCTAD was updating its guidelines, but also at the Hague Conference on Private International Law. The book includes the contributions of various Committee members in the past few years and is a result of the cooperation between the Committee members and experts from Australia, Brazil, Canada and China. It is divided into three parts: the first part addresses trends and challenges in international protection of consumers, while the second part focuses on financial crises and consumer protection and the third part examines national and regional consumer law issues.

This is a truly international effort, and one with a strong commitment to human rights by the highly reputable authors coming from different jurisdictions! The many facets of today s consumer law are presented to the reader, including developing countries a fascinating effort in a dynamically emerging field of law! We are comprehensively informed about such bread and butter areas as advertising, unfair terms, consumer guarantees, product safety and liability, consumer credit, and redress. But traditional consumer law concepts and remedies are facing challenges in more complex areas, like services of general internet where consumers and private users should enjoy equal access to universal services , with the internet where speed must not be a pretext to eliminate standards of fair dealing, with risky investment services under the problematic paradigm shift from investor protection to investor confidence . A book to read, to think about, to work with for everybody interested in the future of consumer markets and law in a time of economic crisis! Norbert Reich, University of Bremen, Germany This is a richly interesting collection of essays, written by leading names in the field. It offers a thoroughly reliable survey of key tensions and challenges in modern consumer law and brilliantly combines thematic overview with detailed analysis. It will stimulate comparative thinking, it will provide a source of information and it will be welcomed by consumer law scholars all over the world. Stephen Weatherill, University of Oxford, UK Consumer law and policy has emerged in the last half-century as a major policy concern for all nations. This Handbook of original contributions provides an international and comparative analysis of central issues in consumer law and policy in developed and developing economies. The Handbook encompasses questions of both social policy and effective business regulation. Many of the issues are common to all countries and are becoming increasingly globalised due to the growth in international trade and technological developments such as the Internet. The authors provide a broad coverage of both substantive topics and institutional questions concerning optimal approaches to enforcement and the role of class actions in consumer policy. It also includes comparative insights into the influential EU and US models of consumer law and relates consumer law to contemporary trends in human rights law. Written by a carefully selected group of international experts, this text represents an authoritative resource for understanding contemporary and future developments in consumer law. This Handbook will provide students, researchers and policymakers with an insight to the main policy debates in each context and provide models of legal regulation to assist in the evaluation of laws and the development of consumer law and policy.

Class actions in privacy law are rapidly growing as a legal vehicle for citizens around the world to hold corporations liable for privacy violations. Current and future developments in these class actions stand to shift the corporate liability landscape for companies that interact with people’s personal information. Privacy class actions are at the intersection of civil litigation, privacy law, and data protection. Developments in privacy class actions raise complex issues of substantive law as well as challenges to the established procedures governing class action litigation. Their outcomes are integral to the evolution of privacy law and data protection law across jurisdictions. This book brings together established scholars in privacy law, data protection law, and collective litigation to offer a detailed perspective on the present and future of collective litigation for privacy claims. Taking a comparative approach, this book incorporates considerations from consumer protection law, procedural law, cross-border litigation, tort law, and data protection law, which are key to understanding the development of privacy class actions. In doing so, it offers an analysis of the novel challenges they pose for courts, regulatory agencies, scholars, and litigators, together with their potential solutions.

"State consumer protection law is a particular challenge to practitioners because there are significant differences in the laws of each state. This treatise has a chapter devoted to each of the fifty states and the District of Columbia, with nearly every chapter written by an attorney practicing in that state. ... This is the first of three volumes updating the former Consumer Protection Law Developments, which was last published in 2016." --