Cox (2004) The extraterritorial enforcement of consumer legislation and the challenge of the internet

getCITED

Home Search Add Content Reports Help

Edit Publication | Edit Contributors | Delete Publication | Edit References | Edit Citations

Add to Bookstack | Show Bookstack | Change Bookstack

The extraterritorial enforcement of consumer legislation and the challenge of the internet

Post a Comment

CONTRIBUTORS:

Author:

Cox, Noel (Auckland University of Technology)

JOURNAL:

The Edinburgh law review, 8(1), 57 - 80.

YEAR:

2004

PUB TYPE:

Journal Article

SUBJECT(S):

law, internet, cyberspace, consumer law, enforcement, private international law, conflict of laws

DISCIPLINE:

Law

HTTP:

LANGUAGE:

English

PUB ID:

103-392-003 (Last edited on 2004/02/22 20:09:03 US/Mountain)

SPONSOR(S):

ABSTRACT:
Cross-border commerce is becoming easier for individual consumers through improvements in telecommunications, including the ability to carry out on-line real-time transactions through the internet. This means that more consumers will be directly importing goods purchased from overseas with the same ease as they once purchased them from suppliers based locally. For consumers, whether the trader they are purchasing from is based locally or overseas should not influence the availability of remedies for defects or breach of contract. Such consumer protection laws are increasingly common at the national level, but their enforcement extraterritorially present major challenges to the global legal system. Consumer protection laws – and laws in general, are presented with practical enforcement difficulties by the internet. The internet potentially increases these challenges to a degree that threatens to undermine the effectiveness of the national consumer protection laws which have been developed hitherto. Whilst business-to-business transactions may continue to be regulated by the rules of private international law, this has proven inadequate for consumer laws. A fundamental issue with internet commerce is the question of which country’s laws apply to the transaction – the jurisdiction or territoriality question. For laws can generally only be enforced through national courts. This becomes especially important in the context of consumer protection laws, for conflict of laws rules were developed in the business-to-business sector, and are unsuited to dealing with the low-cost transactions which constitute the great majority of business-to-consumer transactions. This paper will examine challenges to the enforcement of national consumer protection laws presented by the internet, and in particular their application and enforcement.

STATISTICS

Click on # to view
Citations		0
References		2
Comments		0
Quality		0/0.00
Interest		0/0.00
View(er)s		3/314

Quality
	N/A
High
	7
	6
	5
	4
	3
	2
	1
Low

Interest
	N/A
High
	7
	6
	5
	4
	3
	2
	1
Low

Prev | Next