Consumer protection law in the age of globalisation poses new challenges for policy-makers. This book highlights the difficulties of framing regulatory responses to the problem of consumers' access to justice in the new international economy. The growth of international consumer transactions in the wake of technological change and the globalisation of markets suggests that governments can no longer develop consumer protection law in isolation from the international legal arena. Leading scholars consider the broader theme of access to justice from socio-legal, law and economics perspectives. Topics include standard form contracts, the legal challenges posed by mass infections (such as mad-cow disease and CJD), ombudsman schemes, class actions, alternative dispute resolution, consumer bankruptcy, conflict of laws, and cross-border transactions. This book demonstrates that advancing and achieving access to justice for consumers proves to be a challenging, and sometimes elusive, task.

Consumer Bankruptcy and over-indebtedness is an emerging field throughout the world. This book provides a comparative appraisal of global developments in this area. It is one of the first book length publications focusing on comparative consumer bankruptcy and over-indebtedness. It combines theoretical and empirical studies of bankruptcy regimes and consumer credit in civilian and common law jurisdictions as well as exploring current reform trends. The book will be of interest to academics, policymakers and law reformers as well as to practitioners.

Bankruptcy in America, in stark contrast to its status in most other countries, typically signifies not a debtor's last gasp but an opportunity to catch one's breath and recoup. Why has the nation's legal system evolved to allow both corporate and individual debtors greater control over their fate than imaginable elsewhere? Masterfully probing the political dynamics behind this question, David Skeel here provides the first complete account of the remarkable journey American bankruptcy law has taken from its beginnings in 1800, when Congress lifted the country's first bankruptcy code right out of English law, to the present day. Skeel shows that the confluence of three forces that emerged over many years--an organized creditor lobby, pro-debtor ideological currents, and an increasingly powerful bankruptcy bar--explains the distinctive contours of American bankruptcy law. Their interplay, he argues in clear, inviting prose, has seen efforts to legislate bankruptcy become a compelling battle royale between bankers and lawyers--one in which the bankers recently seem to have gained the upper hand. Skeel demonstrates, for example, that a fiercely divided bankruptcy commission and the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress have yielded the recent, ideologically charged battles over consumer bankruptcy. The uniqueness of American bankruptcy has often been noted, but it has never been explained. As different as twenty-first century America is from the horse-and-buggy era origins of our bankruptcy laws, Skeel shows that the same political factors continue to shape our unique response to financial distress.

Monica Prasad’s powerful demand-side hypothesis addresses three questions: Why does the United States have more poverty than any other developed country? Why did it experience an attack on state intervention in the 1980s, known today as the neoliberal revolution? And why did it recently suffer the greatest economic meltdown in seventy-five years?