Contract and Consumer Law

This chapter aims to give an overview of the contractual issues that have arisen in relation to the use of data. Since the use of data has far-reaching consequences for consumer markets, the chapter focuses on issues that have arisen in those markets and the regulatory responses that have emerged, or are emerging, in consumer law. It considers in particular what effects the use of data has on the autonomy of contracting parties and on the balance of contractual fairness, and examines three more specific issues for consumer contract law, namely transparency, payment with data, and the question whether the ‘consumer’ concept needs adjusting. The focus of this chapter is mainly on the EU, with occasional references to the US, seeing that Europe has developed a fairly coherent regime of harmonised consumer contract law that in many aspects already applies to data-related contracts

Administrative and Judicial Collective Enforcement of Consumer Law in the US and the European Community

In the consumer society, as it stands today in Western-type democracies, consumers have a far larger choice of products and services originating from all over the world than they did decades ago. Risks associated with products and services have also increased, as have mass problems and mass damages, often in a transborder dimension. The US and the European Community, though battling against common problems, maintain different standard setting and enforcement regimes. This paper focuses on enforcement regimes, thereby distinguishing between administrative enforcement via agencies and judicial collective enforcement via European collective actions and US class actions. The existing theoretical framework depicting administrative and judicial enforcement as alternative strategies is contrasted against modern developments in the US and the EC. In the field of consumer protection administrative control and judicial collective enforcement are being understood more as functional complements than alternatives. Enforcement covers negotiation, settlement, adjudication and arbitration. The analysis of the institutional variables determining the choice between administrative and judicial control – ex ante vs. ex post control, injunctive relief versus damages, personal injuries and economic losses, sector specificity vs. general instruments to protect consumers, public agencies vs. private organisations – provide the ground for preliminary thoughts on a revised theoretical approach