Consumer Contracts

The American Law Institute's membership will vote next Tuesday (the 21st) on whether to approve the ALI's Consumer Contracts Restatement project.  Let me recap why you should care about this project:  it opens the door for businesses to use contract to abuse consumers in basically any way they want.

More problems are emerging with the legal research underlying the American Law Institute's Consumer Contracts Restatement project.  The Consumer Contracts Restatement has been the subject of scholarly criticism for a while because of its novel quantitative empirical approach (case counting).  The Restatement stands on six empirical studies of consumer contracts.

The Yale Journal on Regulation is holding an on-line symposium about the draft Restatement of the Law of Consumer Contracts, which is scheduled for a vote at the American Law Institute's annual meeting this May.  The launching point for the symposium are a pair of articles in JREG that take sharp issue with the empirical studies that underlie the draft Restatement.

A final installment to this evening's blog storm (you can tell that I'm procrastinating on exam grading...).

The Consumer Financial Protection Act prohibits "unfair" acts and practices.  "Unfair" is defined as an act or practice that causes or is likely to cause substantial injury to consumers, that is not reasonably avoidable by consumers, and the harm of which is not outweighed by benefits to consumers or competition.