The Law of Consumer Redress in an Evolving Digital Market

Pablo Cortés is Professor of Civil Justice at Leicester Law School. He has advised the European Commission during the drafting of legislation on consumer online dispute resolution (ODR) and alternative dispute resolution (ADR), and has been invited to write reports and to participate in expert meetings, inter alia, by the UN Commission on International Trade Law, the European Commission and the European Parliament. He serves on the advisory board of the ODR Civil Justice Council and the International Mediation Institute, and he has worked as a consultant for a number of organisations. He is Fellow of the European Law Institute and the National Centre for Technology and Dispute Resolution (University of Massachusetts), and in 2012 he was a Gould Research Fellow at Stanford University, California.

Introduction; 1. Consumer redress – from public enforcement to alternative dispute resolution; 2. Upgrading from alternative to online dispute resolution; 3. Judicial redress for consumer disputes – the need for collaboration between courts and extrajudicial scheme; 4. Out of court consumer redress – the European law on ADR and the re-design of the ODR platform; 5. Consumer ADR in three radically different jurisdictions – Italy, Spain and the UK; 6. Pursuing global consensus on consumer redress – the UNCITRAL technical notes for online dispute resolution; 7. Voluntariness as the Achilles' heel of ADR – the case for incentives and mandatory redress schemes; 8. Dispute system design features of effective consumer redress models; Conclusion.