Regulation of the content of standard-form contracts usually focuses on the invisible terms that customers hardly ever read. It does not refer to the price, because price is a salient component of the transaction, to which customers usually pay attention and sometimes even compare between suppliers. However, it is often difficult to draw the line between the price and price-related, invisible terms.This report -- prepared for the 2018 general conference of the International Academy of Comparative Law -- analyzes the Israeli experience concerning the regulation of prices and price-related terms. The Israeli experience is interesting for several reasons. These include the fact that in 1964, Israel was the first country to enact a specific Law regulating the content of standard-form contracts, which established both a framework for ex post judicial supervision and a mechanism for ex ante, administrative/quasi-judicial supervision; the various reforms made in these mechanisms throughout the years, including the de facto abolition of the administrative/quasi-judicial mechanism in 2014; and the activist policy adopted by the Israeli Banking Supervisor. While Israeli law -- much like other systems -- has long imposed strict disclosure duties on banks, insurers, and other suppliers, unlike some other systems, it has always regulated the content of contracts, as well. This regulation was vital during the 2008 subprime crisis, in which Israel suffered little, and recovered quickly.

This book explores various approaches around the world regarding price term control, and particularly discusses the effectiveness of two major paths: ex ante regulatory and ex post judicial intervention. Price control and its limits are issues that affect all liberal market economies, as well as more regulated markets. For the past several years, courts in many different countries have been confronted with the issue of whether, and to what extent, they should intervene regarding price-related terms in standard form contracts – especially in the area of consumer contracts. Open price clauses, flat remunerations, price adjustment clauses, clauses giving the seller/supplier the right to ask for additional payments, bundling or partitioning practices, etc.: a variety of price related terms are used to manipulate customers’ choices, often also by exploiting their behavioral biases. The result is an unfavorable contract that is later challenged in court. However, invalidating a given price term in standard forms e.g. of a banking or utilities contract only has an inter partes effect, which means that in thousands if not millions of similar contracts, the same clauses continue to be used. Effective procedural rules are often lacking. Therefore, pricing patterns that serve to hide rather than to reveal the real cost of goods and services require special attention on the part of regulators. The aim of this book is to determine the various approaches in the world regarding price term control, and particularly to discuss the efficiency of both paths, ex ante regulatory and ex post judicial intervention. Thanks to its broad comparative analysis, this book offers a thorough overview of the methods employed in several countries. It gathers twenty-eight contributions from national rapporteurs and one supra-national rapporteur (EU) to the 2018 IACL Congress held in Fukuoka. These are supplemented by a general report presented at the same IACL Congress, which includes a comparative analysis of the national and supranational reports. The national contributors hail from around the globe, including Africa (1), Asia (5), Europe (17), the European Union (1) and the Americas (5).

This edited volume covers the challenges currently faced by consumer law in Europe and the United States, ranging from fundamental theoretical questions, such as what goals consumer law should pursue, to practical questions raised by disclosure requirements, the General Data Protection Regulation and technology advancements. With governments around the world enacting powerful new regulations concerning consumers, consumer law has become an important topic in the economic analysis of law. Intended to protect consumers, these regulations typically seek to do so by giving them tools to make better decisions, or by limiting the consequences of their bad decisions. Legal scholars are divided, however, regarding the efficacy and effects of these regulations; some call for certain policies to be abolished, while others support a regulatory expansion.

The variety, pace, and power of technological innovations that have emerged in the 21st Century have been breathtaking. These technological developments, which include advances in networked information and communications, biotechnology, neurotechnology, nanotechnology, robotics, and environmental engineering technology, have raised a number of vital and complex questions. Although these technologies have the potential to generate positive transformation and help address 'grand societal challenges', the novelty associated with technological innovation has also been accompanied by anxieties about their risks and destabilizing effects. Is there a potential harm to human health or the environment? What are the ethical implications? Do this innovations erode of antagonize values such as human dignity, privacy, democracy, or other norms underpinning existing bodies of law and regulation? These technological developments have therefore spawned a nascent but growing body of 'law and technology' scholarship, broadly concerned with exploring the legal, social and ethical dimensions of technological innovation. This handbook collates the many and varied strands of this scholarship, focusing broadly across a range of new and emerging technology and a vast array of social and policy sectors, through which leading scholars in the field interrogate the interfaces between law, emerging technology, and regulation. Structured in five parts, the handbook (I) establishes the collection of essays within existing scholarship concerned with law and technology as well as regulatory governance; (II) explores the relationship between technology development by focusing on core concepts and values which technological developments implicate; (III) studies the challenges for law in responding to the emergence of new technologies, examining how legal norms, doctrine and institutions have been shaped, challenged and destabilized by technology, and even how technologies have been shaped by legal regimes; (IV) provides a critical exploration of the implications of technological innovation, examining the ways in which technological innovation has generated challenges for regulators in the governance of technological development, and the implications of employing new technologies as an instrument of regulatory governance; (V) explores various interfaces between law, regulatory governance, and new technologies across a range of key social domains.