European Consumer Access to Justice Revisited

Stefan Wrbka is Associate Professor for European and Comparative Private Law at Kyushu University, Japan. His principal field of academic research concerns various aspects of consumer protection law, with a focus on developments within the European Union.

Part I. Setting the Stage: Access to Justice 2.0: 1. At the very outset; 2. Access to justice 2.0: breaking it into pieces; Part II. Procedural Law: The Traditional Pillar of Access to Justice 2.0: 3. A brief outline of the developments at the pan-EU level; 4. Prime examples; 5. Compensatory collective redress: the next step?; 6. Where to go from here?; Part III. Substantive Law: Complementing Access to Justice 2.0: 7. Widening the scope of the value-oriented justice discussion; 8. Substantive consumer law-making in the course of time; 9. Recent trends and developments; 10. The common European sales law; 11. Summarising comments on the defragmentation of substantive consumer laws in the context of the CRD and the CESL; Part IV. Consumer Access to Justice 2.0: A Multidimensional Framework: 12. From the current state of consumer law to consumer access to justice 2.0; 13. The justice debate and consumer legislation; 14. (Responses to) counter-arguments to third-party intervention; 15. Consumer empowerment; 16. Lessons to be drawn.