Consumer Law

What rights do you have when your online order does not arrive? Or your flight is cancelled? Or your carefully chosen hotel turns out not to exist?
Consumer law regulates the daily transactions between businesses and consumers and provides answers to all these questions and many more. This course will teach you about legal consumer protection, specifically in the EU, and how it relates to consumer contracts, business conduct, consumer safety and product quality.
You will be provided with a legal toolkit for solving practical cases. Examples of legislation that we will study include the Consumer rights Directive; the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive; the Unfair contract terms Directive; the Air passenger rights Regulation; the Package travel Directive; and the Sales Directive and Product Liability Directive

After the successful completion of this course, students are expected to be able to:

• recognize key characteristics of different types of transactions made between consumers and businesses;
• identify and understand the legal principles and EU rules that govern consumer transactions and consumer rights;
• use relevant databases for researching EU consumer law;
• apply EU consumer law to factual scenarios in order to solve legal case questions;
• form opinions and personal perspectives on rules, principles and policies of consumer market regulation, and generate policy proposals.

Assumed Knowledge:
Students without a legal background are recommended to have taken LAW12806 Introduction to Law for the Life and Social Sciences. Alternatively, students can take LAW59703 Essential Law through self-study at any time of the year. The course LAW12346–Commercial Law introduces some of the topics in this course.