CONSUMERS AND CONSUMER PROTECTION LAW

Abstract

‘Consumer law’ could be understood as all laws and regulations affecting consumption and the structuring of consumer markets. This would include most of the legal system- competition law, intellectual property, etc. However, in this paper, the focus is primarily on tradition areas of consumer law. In everyday life we also use these areas to integrate consumer credit, advertising, product safety- to illustrate some of the difficult economic, political and institutional choices that consumer law is ‘about the fundamentals’ of our economic system. But more importantly it is about the fundamentals of our system writ large- about our system of government, politics, policy making and priority setting.