Hans-W. Micklitz

Enforcement and Effectiveness of Consumer Law

Since the famous declaration of President Kennedy in 1962, consumer policy and consumer law have undergone an amazing and unforeseen development. Today it could be regarded as a separate branch of the legal system not only in the Western World, the EU and the United States, but all over the world, independent from the political and economic regime. Regional organisations such as the OECD and later the EU had spearheaded the development long before the United Nations kept the ball rolling via the adoption of the UN Guidelines in 1985. As society changed, so has consumer law, from the consumption society to the service society and from there to the information society. Today one might go as far as to speak of a second generation of consumer laws which are more and more focusing on services and lately on digitization and even sustainability, overshadowing the classical and more traditional focus on consumer products.

Introduction – contract and regulation: changing paradigms: A Handbook on New Methods of Law Making in Private Law

The purpose of this Research Handbook is not to expound the law of contract or to debate nice doctrinal points that arise within that body of law. Rather, this Handbook is provoked by a number of questions arising from, first, public regulatory projects that seemingly rework and repurpose the (private) law of contract and, secondly, the extensive private regulation of both transactors and transactions. With regard to the latter, we need to understand more about the ways in which business communities organise and order their transactions in the shadow of the law of contract but also we need to pay critical attention to the use of contracting power by multinational corporations who can rival nation states in setting the terms of production and trade for their suppliers. With regard to the former, we need to reflect on the co-opting of private law in the service of public purposes and, in particular, the development of a regulatory mindset that views the law of contract as a tool to be shaped and applied for such purposes. To the extent that commentaries on the law of contract ignore these questions, they neglect the actuality of transactional practices with which the law is intended to engage; they neglect the norms that actually guide contractors; they neglect the regulatory role played by some contractors; and they neglect the changing role that the law of contract plays in the regulatory environment. Such commentaries are like guidebooks that give detailed historic descriptions of city centres that are either no longer where we find the commercial and cultural life of the metropolis or that are in the process of being redeveloped for new futures.

Behördliche Rechtsdurchsetzung in Deutschland – Potenziale und Perspektiven für den Verbraucherschutz

Die mir gestellte Aufgabe beschaftigt die deutsche Rechtspolitik seit dem Jahre 1976, also seit 40 Jahren. Seinerzeit hatten Norbert Reich, Klaus Tonner und Hartmut Wegener in einem Gutachten fur die 1971 eingesetzte Kommission zum wirtschaftlichen und sozialen Wandel dafur pladiert, die behordliche Durchsetzung des kollektiven Verbraucherschutzes dem Bundeskartellamt zu ubertragen. Dazu ist es bekanntlich nicht gekommen. Gibt es neue Argumente, die 40 Jahre spater die Errichtung einer Behorde rechtfertigen oder tragen die damals obsiegenden Zweifel immer noch? Welche Rolle spielt die Ubernahme des Verbraucherrechts und – zunehmend – der Verbraucherrechts-Durchsetzung durch die EU?