This semester,
I got the opportunity to do some teaching in the UK. The English legal system
offers many interesting topics of study, especially when coming from a civil
law background. For those of you who might sometimes feel a bit lost when
studying the many different legal conceptions of 'the consumer' in the EU, the
following conference (which will take place in Oxford on 27 and 28 March) may
offer a nice possibility to explore these differences:
'The
Image(s) of the ‘Consumer’ in EU Law: Legislation, Free Movement and
Competition Law
Organisers: Professor Stephen Weatherill & Dr Dorota Leczykiewicz
The purpose of the conference is to discuss the concepts of ‘consumer
welfare’, ‘consumer protection’ and ‘consumer interest’ in different contexts
of EU law: legislation, free movement and competition law. The theme of the
conference is inspired by the persisting questions about how many visions of
the consumer there are in EU law, and whether they are consistent and sincere,
or merely instrumental to the achievement of other goals. We are all ‘consumers’
and we are all different: are the different types of ‘consumer’ we find
scattered across EU law (empowered, confident, alert, information-seeking,
victim of unfairness, vulnerable) apt reflection of rich diversity or do they
create a troublingly chaotic landscape? Discussing these questions seems
particularly timely a few years after the Treaty of Lisbon, which reformed
Union objectives to include a ‘social market economy’, and the Charter which
elevated ‘consumer protection’ to the status of a fundamental right. Our aim is
to encourage discussion of the consumer-related considerations in different
contexts of EU law – both where the EU sets the rules and where EU law checks
the validity of public and private practices at national level - and encourage
reflection on whether there are and whether there should be common assumptions,
principles and trends running through different parts of EU law. The ambition
is to explore the image or images of the ‘consumer’ as a bridging concept which
connects the distinct strands of analysis in EU law, and against whose
background shared approaches, but also mutual planned or unplanned
incoherencies, could be assessed.
Conference papers will consider how consumers are implicated in the
decision as to whether the EU has a competence to legislate under Article 114
TFEU, in particular in connection with the constitutional limits which the
Court of Justice imposes on the use of this competence conferring provision,
and how the consumer interest is interpreted in existing legislation, as well
as how it has been defined in recent preparatory documents and in the
Commission’s policy statements. While the Commission focuses mainly on ‘empowering’
consumers through free movement law and through EU legislative intervention the
contributors will be encouraged to discuss how to incorporate other goals
beyond ‘empowerment’ within EU consumer policy. Other papers will look at the
extent to which the consumer interest is the rationale behind EU free movement
law, and how consumer preferences and habits are broken down by EU law’s
insistence on ensuring access of foreign products and services to markets of
the Member States, as well as at the use by the Court of Justice of the EU of
the consumer protection justification in the context of Articles 34 and 56
TFEU. Papers on EU competition law will undoubtedly focus on the 2004
Commission Guidelines on the application of Article 101 TFEU, where protection
of competition has been expressed as ‘a means of enhancing consumer welfare’.
We also wish to approach the question of consumer protection from a private law
perspective and, hopefully, explore the potential role of consumer interest in
the creation of common European contract law.'
More information is available on the website of the University of Oxford.
