[CCPL Seminar] Consumer Law and Inequality: Comparative Approaches to Consumer Vulnerability in Europe and Latin America
5 February 2025 (Wednesday)
12pm – 1pm (HKT)
Room 723, Cheng Yu Tung Tower, Centennial Campus, The University of Hong Kong
Whether consumer law should address inequality has been approached from different perspectives in Latin America and Europe. In Europe, EU consumer law has historically emphasised consumer empowerment, and the Court of Justice of the European Union has predominantly formed its jurisprudence around the interpretive benchmark of the “average consumer”. Conversely, Consumer Protection Statutes in Latin America emphasise consumer protection, and, by consequence, courts have generally embraced the interpretive benchmark of the “vulnerable consumer”. This talk seeks to delineate the consequences of this distinctive difference: the more consumer law moves toward empowerment and embraces the average consumer standard, the less sensitive it is to the vulnerabilities that impair consumer decision-making, which hinders the model’s capacity to address inequality in consumer transactions. Following an examination of the European experience, the talk takes a closer look at consumer protection law in Argentina, where courts embrace the task of using consumer law to reduce inequality. In particular, it focuses on the recently introduced category of the “hyper-vulnerable consumer”, emphasising vulnerability due to age, gender, physical or mental state or social, economic, ethnic, and/or cultural circumstances. The comparison shows how countries in Latin America have embraced legal doctrines that diverge from traditional approaches in the Global North and opens up an avenue for identifying “reverse convergence” – areas where the Global North converges with Latin American doctrines. This broader perspective brings to light the salience of the structural character of consumer vulnerability, an aspect that is increasingly important against the backdrop of the rapid rise of new technologies whose harms have a direct impact on consumers’ rights to safety, privacy, and non-discrimination.
Prior registration is required for this in-person event: https://bit.ly/4a8gK0K