An Introduction to the Issue of Consumer Law in South America

Journal of Consumer Policy - This Special Issue has a long history. It goes back to a conference in July 2017 organized by Cláudia Lima Marques in Porto Alegre Brazil, the first of the Center...     

The Empire Strikes Back: Digital Control of Unfair Terms of Online Services

The authors argue that it is possible to partly automate the process of abstract control of fairness of clauses in online consumer contracts. The authors present a theoretical and empirical argument for this claim, including a brief presentation of the software they have designed. This type of automation would not replace human lawyers but would assist them and make their work more effective and efficient. Policy makers should direct their attention to the potential of using algorithmic techniques in enforcing the law regarding unfair contractual terms, and to facilitating research on and ultimately implementing such technologies.     

Book Notes “Law” 1/2022

Journal of Consumer Policy -     

Consumers and deregulation of the electricity market in Germany

Against the backcloth of EU regulation, this note looks at the “politics of necessity” regarding electricity provision in Germany. Electricity as a case is chosen because its provision has been undergoing a profound process of liberalisation and deregulation, and there is a considerable amount of experience with the chances and pitfalls of liberalisation in this sector. Secondly, electricity is a network industry and a natural monopoly subject to systematic market failure, which calls for regulation. The paper starts out with a closer look at the consumer as an actor in the regulation process, proposing a three-role model of the consumer as a market player, as a citizen, and as a micro-producer in households and networks. In these roles, consumers take on different social and political identities; they are affected differently by (de)regulation of essential services and have different options for reacting to quality and price issues. It then describes the legal state and the development of deregulation in the electricity sector in Germany. Selected empirical data are presented, and consumer policy implications are drawn.     

Injuries from wood preservatives

This paper gives an account of the dangers to human health arising from PCP and lindane based wood preservatives, how the issue arose in Germany, and how those injured by wood preservatives took the initiative to organize themselves in order to defend their interests against the chemical industry. The latter played down the risks, and in so doing benefitted from the German public authorities' sustained reluctance to tackle the problem of a possible link between injuries and the hazardous wood preservatives. Press and media played a key role in the process of creating public awareness of the risks resulting from wood preservatives. Lawyers have become involved in helping to pinpoint responsibility: Have consumers been used as guinea pigs for the chemical industry, and has the chemical industry really done all it can to prevent people from being endangered and injured? Some twenty actions have been brought before the courts, actions which have been accompanied by a growing public awareness. Legal and judicial solutions are not yet in sight. The jurisprudence is far from settled. The paper aims at describing and analyzing the strategies of the injured and the counter attacks of industry, at elaborating the role of the judiciary in a field where legal arguments are inseparably linked to political decisions, and finally at setting out the cornerstones of the legal debate. It might well be that the solution will be found on the political floor. The German civil courts do not seem to be willing to take over the responsibility and to condemn the German chemical industry for compensation. The solution might derive from the Frankfurt public prosecutor engagement which has been invoked by several thousand injured people. The public prosecutor has now accused those responsible in the chemical industry, thereby possibly preparing the ground for a joint commitment of the industry and the German government, for which the Thalidomide catastrophe might serve as a precedent.