Jonathan Hill, CROSS-BORDER CONSUMER CONTRACTS Oxford: Oxford University Press (www.oup.co.uk), Oxford Private International Law Series, 2008. xxxvi + 427 pp. ISBN 9780199276547. £95.
| Published date | 01 May 2009 |
| Date | 01 May 2009 |
| DOI | 10.3366/E1364980909001577 |
| Pages | 346-348 |
| Author | Elizabeth Crawford |
Private international law within the Brussels regime and, through the principle of universal application, beyond it makes especially advantageous provision for “protected persons” in securing for them, in terms of jurisdiction and choice of law rules, the privileges deemed due to the disadvantaged. “The consumer” (rich or poor) has always been a member of this favoured group. By cumulative effect of Council Regulation (EC) 44/2001 (jurisdiction) and the Rome I Convention on the Law Applicable to Contractual Obligations, about to be replaced by the Rome I Regulation, the consumer, the employee and the insured party each soon will wear a protective and, it is to be hoped, seamless cape. A comprehensive and well-informed account of this corpus of rules from the pen of a distinguished conflict lawyer and author is much to be desired, and could be said to be not unexpected. Such a book was a book waiting to be written.
But this is much more than such a book. Professor Hill's aims transcend a traditional treatment. The volume, which is an addition to the prestigious titles in the Oxford Private International Law Series, is a monograph on how to deliver “access-to-justice” to the consumer, written on the premise that litigation is ill-suited to the resolution of most consumer disputes. It is salutary to be told by a leading conflict lawyer that private international law is largely irrelevant to the task; and at the same time cheering to read that there is less to e-commerce, from a legal point of view, than meets the eye. Though the relevant conflict of laws rules are presented at suitable length, analytically, and with unflinching regard to current detail (in chs 1-7 and 12), they appear as precursors to the main event, which is a review of the many other possible modes of solving consumer disputes (i.e. disputes between consumers and businesses: “b2c”) in the real and the virtual worlds.
Inevitably, this mode of treating the subject encourages a sense of anticipation, feeding upon the examination and criticism, in turn, of each potential solution; that is to say: conflict of laws rules, including new EC instruments expediting judgment enforcement in the cases of uncontested claims and small debts (more likely, in Hill's view, to assist
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