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Books > Law > Laws of other jurisdictions & general law > Financial, taxation, commercial, industrial law > Consumer law
This book advocates a new way of thinking about mortgage contracts.
This claim is based on the assumption that we currently live in a
political economy in which consumer debt fulfils a social function.
In the field of housing this is evidenced by the expansion of
mortgage credit through which consumers are to purchase residential
property as a means of social inclusion and personal welfare. It is
suggested that contract law needs to adjust to this new social
function in order to avoid welfare losses in terms of default,
over-indebtedness, and possibly eviction. To this end, this book
analyses theoretical contract law frameworks and makes concrete
proposals for contract law in the EU legal order.
The collapse of the Rana Plaza in Bangladesh (2013) is one of many
cases to invoke critical scrutiny and moral outrage regarding the
conditions under which consumer goods sold on our markets are
produced elsewhere. In spite of abiding moral concerns, these goods
remain popular and consumers continue to buy them. Such
transactions for goods made under deplorable production conditions
are usually presumed to count as 'normal' market transactions, ie
transactions that are recognized as valid consumer-contracts under
the rules of contract law. Minimum Contract Justice challenges this
presumption of normality. It explores the question of how theories
of justice bear on such consumer contracts; how should a society
treat a transaction for a good made under deplorable conditions
elsewhere? This Book defends the position that a society that
strives to be minimally just should not lend its power to enforce,
support, or encourage transactions that are incompatible with the
ability of others elsewhere to live decent human lives. As such,
the book introduces a new perspective on the legal debate
concerning deplorable production conditions that has settled around
ideas of corporate responsibility, and the pursuit of international
labour rights.
How do ordinary people access justice? This book offers a novel
socio-legal approach to access to justice, alternative dispute
resolution, vulnerability and energy poverty. It poses an access to
justice challenge and rethinks it through a lens that accommodates
all affected people, especially those who are currently falling
through the system. It raises broader questions about alternative
dispute resolution, the need for reform to include more collective
approaches, a stronger recognition of the needs of vulnerable
people, and a stronger emphasis on delivering social justice. The
authors use energy poverty as a site of vulnerability and examine
the barriers to justice facing this excluded group. The book
assembles the findings of an interdisciplinary research project
studying access to justice and its barriers in the UK, Italy,
France, Bulgaria and Spain (Catalonia). In-depth interviews with
regulators, ombuds, energy companies, third-sector organisations
and vulnerable people provide a rich dataset through which to
understand the phenomenon. The book provides theoretical and
empirical insights which shed new light on these issues and sets
out new directions of inquiry for research, policy and practice. It
will be of interest to researchers, students and policymakers
working on access to justice, consumer vulnerability, energy
poverty, and the complex intersection between these fields. The
book includes contributions by Cosmo Graham (UK), Sarah Supino and
Benedetta Voltaggio (Italy), Marine Cornelis (France), Anais Varo
and Enric Bartlett (Catalonia) and Teodora Peneva (Bulgaria).
This book provides a broad conspectus on the application of EU and
international regulation of the food sector on English law. It is
aimed at practitioners and students of this vital and emerging
branch of law, which has become an important part of current
political and legal debate. It is written not just for lawyers as a
statement of current law, but is also aimed at all those involved
or interested in the food industry who wish to familiarise
themselves with how the law is applied practically in this
jurisdiction. The book commences with a short conceptual framework
for the study of food law. It then provides a comprehensive and
up-to-date account of current English law, explaining fully the
detailed processes by which both international and national law and
EU decision making have impacted upon most aspects of the
production, sale and consumption of food in England. The book
explains and assesses the operation of the current law by
describing in detail the roles of Government, the Food Standards
Agency and local enforcement authorities in the making and
enforcing of laws concerning food. The work contains full outlines
of the developments in the most significant areas of food law. It
concentrates specifically on topics such as food labelling and
advertising, quality and compositional requirements, geographical
food names, genetic modification, organic production, animal
welfare and also the role of law in tackling poor health, obesity,
and diet-related disease. The book, though primarily designed as a
law text, goes beyond the usual confines of such works. It sets out
to explain and describe the impact of successive food crises, such
as BSE and the use of horsemeat in beef products, on food safety
and transparency requirements. The book considers and assesses how
the existing rules on the chemical and biological safety of food
impact on our law, and concludes with a review of the developing
legal issues concerning the environmental impacts of current and
proposed food law, in particular the relationship between food law,
climate change and food security.
It has long been thought that fairness in European Consumer Law
would be achieved by relying on information as a remedy and
expecting the average consumer to keep businesses in check by
voting with their feet. This monograph argues that the way consumer
law operates today promises a lot but does not deliver enough. It
struggles to avoid harm being caused to consumers and it struggles
to repair the harm after the event. To achieve fairness, solutions
need to be found elsewhere. Consumer Theories of Harm offers an
alternative model to assess where and how consumer detriment may
occur and solutions to prevent it. It shows that a more confident
use of economic theory will allow practitioners to demonstrate how
a poor standard of professional diligence lies at the heart of
consumer harm. The book provides both theoretical and practical
examples of how to combine existing law with economic theory to
improve case outcomes. The book shows how public enforcers can move
beyond the dominant transparency paradigm to an approach where
firms have a positive duty to treat consumers fairly and shape
their commercial offers in a way that prevents consumers from
making mistakes. Over time, this 'fairness-by-design' approach will
emerge as the only acceptable way to compete.
This book discusses the role of private law as an instrument to
produce financial and social inclusion in a context characterised
by the redefinition of the role of the State and by the
financialisation of society. By depicting the political and
economic developments behind the popular idea of financial
inclusion, the book deconstructs that notion, illustrating the
existence and interaction of different discourses surrounding it.
The book further traces the evolution of inclusion, specifically in
the European context, and thus moves on to analyse the legal rules
which are most relevant for the purposes of bringing about the
financialisation of the citizen. Hence, the author focuses more on
four highly topical areas: access to a bank account, access to
credit, over indebtedness, and financial education. Adopting a
critical and inter-disciplinary approach, The Financialisation of
the Citizen takes the reader through a top-down journey starting
from the political economy of financialisation, to the law and
policy of the European Union, and finally to more specific private
law rules.
The principle of legal certainty is of fundamental importance for
law and society: it has been vital in stabilising normative
expectations and in providing a framework for social interaction,
as well as defining the scope of individual freedom and political
power. Even though it has not always been fully realised, legal
certainty has also functioned as a normative ideal that has
structured legal debates, both at the national and transnational
level. This book presents research from a range of substantive
areas regarding the meaning, possibility and desirability of legal
certainty in the context of a rapidly changing global society. It
aims to address these issues by bringing together scholars from
various jurisdictions in order to examine changes in the shifting
meaning of legal certainty in a comparative and transnational
context. In particular, the book explores some of the tensions that
now exist between the conventional expectation of legal certainty
and the various challenges associated with regulating highly
complex, late modern economies and societies. The book will be of
interest to lawyers concerned with understanding the transformation
of core rule of law values in the context of contemporary social
change, as well as to political scientists and social theorists.
This book examines how regulatory and liability mechanisms have
impacted upon product safety decisions in the pharmaceutical and
medical devices sectors in Europe, the USA and beyond since the
1950s. Thirty-five case studies illustrate the interplay between
the regulatory regimes and litigation. Observations from medical
practice have been the overwhelming means of identifying
post-marketing safety issues. Drug and device safety decisions have
increasingly been taken by public regulators and companies within
the framework of the comprehensive regulatory structure that has
developed since the 1960s. In general, product liability cases have
not identified or defined safety issues, and function merely as
compensation mechanisms. This is unsurprising as the thresholds for
these two systems differ considerably; regulatory action can be
triggered by the possibility that a product might be harmful,
whereas establishing liability in litigation requires proving that
the product was actually harmful. As litigation normally post-dates
regulatory implementation, the 'private enforcement' of public law
has generally not occurred in these sectors. This has profound
implications for the design of sectoral regulatory and liability
regimes, including associated features such as extended liability
law, class actions and contingency fees. This book forms a major
contribution to the academic debate on the comparative utility of
regulatory and liability systems, on public versus private
enforcement, and on mechanisms of behaviour control.
This book charts the transformative shifts in techniques that seek
to deliver collective redress, especially for mass consumer claims
in Europe. It shows how traditional approaches of class litigation
(old technology) have been eclipsed by the new technology of
regulatory redress techniques and consumer ombudsmen. It describes
a series of these techniques, each illustrated by leading examples
taken from a 2016 pan-EU research project. It then undertakes a
comparative evaluation of each technique against key criteria, such
as effective outcomes, speed, and cost. The book reveals major
transformations in European legal systems, shows the overriding
need to view legal systems from fresh viewpoints, and to devise a
new integrated model.
La legislation alimentaire europeenne poursuit les objectifs de la
protection de la sante des personnes et des interets des
consommateurs. L'information des consommateurs joue un role
important pour atteindre ces objectifs. Sur la base de
l'information qui leur est fournie, les consommateurs operent un
choix en connaissance de cause. Ils deviennent donc responsables de
la protection de leur sante, ainsi que de leurs interets legitimes
par la voie de la liberte du choix. La transparence est
fondamentale pour l'accomplissement des objectifs generaux de la
legislation alimentaire. Si la transparence n'est pas suffisante,
les consommateurs sont amenes a choisir sur la base d'informations
incompletes, ce qui empeche d'atteindre ces objectifs et, de plus,
opere une responsabilisation des consommateurs. Le caractere
suffisant de la transparence, afin d'accomplir les objectifs de la
legislation alimentaire, fait l'objet d'une etude approfondie dans
cet ouvrage compose de deux parties. La premiere partie est
consacree a l'analyse de la transparence sur les denrees
alimentaires, car elle permet notamment la protection des interets
des consommateurs. La deuxieme partie porte sur la transparence
concernant les risques alimentaires, qui rend possible la
protection de la sante des consommateurs.
The importance of services in the EU economy has increased
exponentially in the last decades as have the number and scope of
EU rules, both those liberalising the provision of services and
those protecting their recipients or consumers - the passengers,
patients, viewers and bank depositors. However, these consumers, in
their capacity as citizens, are increasingly disillusioned with the
EU and its institutions. This book, written by practitioners,
academics and advocates before the European Court, reflects on
these developments, examining rules in numerous service sectors,
from the capping of roaming call charges upheld in the Vodafone
decision, through health care, to the requirement for air carriers
to care for and compensate passengers approved in the generous
Sturgeon judgment. The Court's positive approach may have been
guided by a desire to consolidate the notion of EU citizenship, a
status introduced, but without clear content, at Maastricht. The
book therefore considers whether these uniform, EU-wide, consumer
rights may not form an important component of such European
citizenship. The Commission's proposal to make 2013 European Year
of Citizens seems to favour such a view.
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