Innovation and the Transformation of Consumer Law

This book covers technologies that pose new challenges for consumer policy, creative developments that can help protect consumers’ economic interests, innovative approaches to addressing perennial consumer concerns, and the challenges entailed by emerging ways of creating and delivering consumer products and services.  In addition, it reflects on past successes and failures of consumer law and policy, explores opportunities for moving consumer law in a different direction, and discusses potential threats to consumer welfare, especially in connection with the changing political landscape in many parts of the world. Several chapters examine consumer law in individual countries, while others have an international focus.

Dan Wei is Full Professor and Associate Dean of the Faculty of Law of the University of Macau. She is a member of the Economic Development Council of the Macau Special Administrative Region Government and Invited Expert of Ascertainment of Foreign Law of the Center for Ascertainment of Foreign Law of the Supreme People’s Court of Republic of China.  She is Vice-President and Titular Member of the International Academy of Comparative Law (IACL), Arbitrator and Mediator of China International Economic and Trade Arbitration Commission (CIETAC), the General Rapporteur of the Committee of International Protection of Consumers of International Law Association (ILA), and a board member of International Association of Consumer Law. In China, she is council member of WTO Research Society of China Law Society, council member of Consumer Protection Research of China Law Society, and council member of Legal Periodicals of China Law Society. She is the Series Editor of “Laws of Emerging Countries” of the Springer. She has authored more than one hundred pieces of different kinds of academic publications on International Trade and Investment Law, Competition Law, Commercial Law, Arbitration, Consumer Law, and Labor Law. Professor Dan Wei is also an expert of China – Portuguese Speaking Countries relations (in particular, Brazil-China and Portugal-China). She is the General Director of Macao Association for Brazilian Studies and Co-Editor-in-Chief of Macau Journal of Brazilian Studies.


James P. Nehf has been teaching contracts, consumer law, and commercial law subjects for more than twenty years. He is an internationally recognized expert in consumer privacy and financial services law and serves as an executive board member of the International Consumer Law Association, a global society of consumer law scholars and policymakers. He has won numerous teaching awards and has been a frequent speaker at law conferences, CLE seminars, and law-related lecture series. Professor Nehf was the Inaugural Director of the law school’s European Law Program and has held several university administrative positions, including a term as Associate Dean for Graduate Studies at the law school and as Interim Director of the Indiana University Center on Southeast Asia. Professor Nehf’s publications include several chapters in a leading commercial law treatise, Secured Transactions Under the Uniform Commercial Code (where he now serves as principal author and editor), an updated and revised edition of Corbin on Contracts—The Impossibility Doctrine, a book on privacy law, Open Book: The Failed Promise of Information Privacy in America, and numerous other book chapters and articles on commercial law, consumer finance, privacy law, low-income consumer transactions, and international/comparative law subjects. He currently serves on the editorial board for the Markets and Law Series at Ashgate Publishing. Professor Nehf graduated first in his law school class, served as Editor-in-Chief of the North Carolina Law Review, and was elected to Order of the Coif. After law school, he worked as a law clerk for the Honorable Phyllis A. Kravitch of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit and entered private practice with O'Melveny & Myers in Washington, D.C. Before joining the faculty in 1989, he was a partner in the Washington firm of Choate, Filler, & Nehf, specializing in commercial and consumer litigation. Professor Nehf has also taught as a Visiting Professor at Wake Forest University, Mercer University, and the University of Georgia. 


Claudia Lima Marques is an expert in the fields of Consumer Law, Private Law, and both Private and Public International Law. Having earned her Bachelor of Law at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, she went on to study a Masters of Law at the University of Tübingen and a Ph.D. summa cum laude at the University of Heidelberg. Currently, Titular Professor and Coordinator of the postgraduate Law Program of the Law School of UFRGS, Claudia holds a number of positions on national and international legal and consumer protection bodies. She has written and lectured extensively on private law, on conflicts of laws, over-indebtedness, and consumer law issues and has published articles in Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, UK, and USA. Recently, she received two degrees of Doutor Honoris Causa from the Universidade Justus Liebig de Giessen of Germany and from Universidade de Savoie Mont Blanc (USMB) of France.