Ambivalences in Consumer Law: Remarks on the Effects of Writing the Law

Abstract

In every legal system, consumer law indicates problems that it is supposed
to solve: imbalance, unfairness and unconscionability. It raises important questions about a legal system’s pre-existing ability to deal with those problems. In a way, consumer law’s very presence in a legal system judges that system.

When considering consumer law as a part of the system, an opposition arises between two kinds of discourse. First, there is a discourse, which constructs consumer law as a legal entity apart from the others, sometimes leftist, founded on a defense of social justice or on market regulation. From this angle, consumer law might easily appear to be subversive. Second, there is a discourse, which results from the effort to accommodate consumer law within the legal tradition’s general private law. Under this discourse, rather than disrupting the core private law, consumer law is integrated into it. A gap may thus be noticeable between the initial intentions that sustain consumer law and the effects it produces. The author’s claim in this paper is that this gap, which generates ambivalence about consumer law, results from western legal systems’ main way of formalizing law in the contemporary era by writing.