Micklitz, Hans-W.; Sibony, Anne-Lise; Esposito, Fabrizio --- "The bright and adventurous future of consumer law research" [2018] ELECD 1289; in Micklitz, Hans-W.; Sibony, Anne-Lise; Esposito, Fabrizio (eds), "Research Methods in Consumer Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2018) 1

Book Title: Research Methods in Consumer Law

Editor(s): Micklitz, Hans-W.; Sibony, Anne-Lise; Esposito, Fabrizio

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN: 9781785366604

Section: Chapter 1

Section Title: The bright and adventurous future of consumer law research

Author(s): Micklitz, Hans-W.; Sibony, Anne-Lise; Esposito, Fabrizio

Number of pages: 36

Abstract/Description:

For decades, consumer law has been the stepchild of the legal discipline, neither public nor private law, not classic but postmodern, not ‘legal enough’, ‘too political’, in short, a discipline at the margins, suffering from the haut goût and striving to change society through law for the ‘better’. Just like Atreyu, Frodo Baggins, Luke Skywalker, the Ghostbusters, Naruto Uzumaki, Dreamworks’ dragon trainer, and many others, consumer law is the underdog carrying the burden of saving the day. Times are changing. We are perhaps reaching the point at which the world comes to understand the real value of consumer law in a society that is dominated by and dependent on private consumption. Publishing houses and ever more numerous researchers from public and private law perspectives, working on national, European and international law are getting into what is no longer a new legal field. Now the time is ripe for a whole Handbook on Consumer Law Research which brings methodology to the fore. This first chapter pursues three aims: first, to embed consumer law research into the overall development of legal research since the rise of consumer law in the 1960s; secondly, to explain our choice to focus on the behavioural turn in consumer law research and present the range of contributions in this volume that engage with the upcoming strand of research; and thirdly, to explore how the recent attention to behavioural insights can be combined with a pre-existing body of doctrinal research and social legal research in consumer law, and outline avenues for further research.