Abstract

While consumer protection policy has an ancient genesis, dating back at least to Roman times with the adoption in Roman law of various implied warranties against latent defects in the sale of goods, the current legislative and regulatory consumer protection framework in most industrialized countries largely finds its genesis in the consumer and more general policy activism of the 1960s and 1970s, during which period most of the major contemporary consumer protection statutes were first enacted or extensively elaborated. As we enter the twenty-first century, pressures on these legal and regulatory regimes are mounting, spurred both by changes in the nature of modern industrial economies and by the evolution of economic theory.In previous writing, with my colleagues, Gillian Hadfield and Robert Howse we attempted to develop, consistently with the regulatory checklist approach recently developed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in its more general work on regulatory reform, a series of questions or guidelines that are relevant specifically to the consumer protection field, and that, in our view, flow from an information-based approach to consumer protection policy, which we argue is the appropriate framework for analyzing most consumer protection problems. In the following section, I briefly recapitulate our principal conclusions from our earlier analysis. In the third section (pp. 80-91), I then review a number of issues pertaining to the role of civil redress with respect to consumer protection problems. In the fourth section (pp. 91-97), I discuss the role of the courts in policing unfair contract terms. The fifth section (pp. 97-98) offers some concluding observations.