Consumer protection law in the age of globalization poses new challenges for policy makers. This book provides an international perspective on consumer law and the difficulties encountered by consumers in search of practical remedies and solutions for defective products and services. Leading scholars outline the key problems faced by legislators in different countries seeking to adapt consumer laws to the global marketplace. Topics include standard form contracts; the legal challenges posed by mass infection (such as mad-cow disease and CJD); consumers and services; consumer bankruptcy law; and cross-border transactions.

In 1880 the federal Parliament of Canada repealed the Insolvent Act of 1875, leaving debtor-creditor matters to be regulated by the provinces. Almost forty years later, Parliament finally passed new bankruptcy legislation, recognizing that what was once considered a moral evil had become a commercial necessity. In Ruin and Redemption, Thomas GW Telfer analyses the ideas, interests, and institutions that shaped the evolution of Canadian bankruptcy law in this era. Examining the vigorous public debates over the idea of bankruptcy, Telfer argues that the law was shaped by conflict over the morality of release from debts and by the divergence of interests between local and distant creditors. Ruin and Redemption is the first full-length study of the origins of Canadian bankruptcy law, thus making it an important contribution to the study of Canada's commercial law.