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Consumer Redress Legislation: Simplifying or Subverting the Law of Contract
Author(s) -
Bant Elise,
Paterson Jeannie Marie
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
the modern law review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.37
H-Index - 22
eISSN - 1468-2230
pISSN - 0026-7961
DOI - 10.1111/1468-2230.12292
Subject(s) - redress , statutory law , legislature , law , private law , legislation , commercial law , business , law and economics , public law , economics , political science
The growth of statutory consumer protection regimes in modern commercial societies has the potential profoundly to disrupt the private law landscape. Such schemes aim to increase access to justice for consumers by offering simplified and clear suites of rights and corresponding remedies. In so doing, however, they affect core areas of private law rights and remedies, and may come to undermine or replace existing contractual principles and policies. The result could be an incoherent system of private law with different principles and rules applying to commercial and consumer transactions. Coherence in the law requires that lawyers abandon their traditional ‘oil and water’ attitudes to legislative schemes and confront directly the interactions between these two bodies of law. This paper engages in that enquiry by considering the relationship between the relatively new consumer redress provisions in the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 and general law principles.