European Consumer Access to Justice Revisited

"European Consumer Access to Justice Revisited takes into account both procedural and substantive law questions in order to give the term 'access to justice' an enhanced meaning. Specifically, it analyses developments and recent trends in EU consumer law and aims to evaluate their potential for increasing consumer confidence in the cross-border market. Via a critical assessment of the advantages and disadvantages of the means initiated at the EU level, the author highlights possible detriments to the cross-border business-to-consumer (B2C) market. To remedy this, he introduces an alternative method of creating a legal framework that facilitates B2C transactions in the EU - 'access to justice 2.0'"-- "Teaching someone a foreign language and teaching a child to speak require the ability to explain terminology in a plain, simple and intelligible language. Writing a law book, in the present case a book about access to justice in the context of European consumer law, cannot, of course, be directly compared to teaching a language. Nevertheless, the situation more or less resembles language teaching, especially if the book is to be understood not only by legal scholars specialising in the particular field at hand, but by a broader audience. Even if one wanted to address only the first group, writing a book on the somewhat vague term 'access to justice' would clearly benefit from a precise definition. The problem with this, however, is that there is not just one legitimate definition of access to justice. While it can be assumed that the meaning of 'access' is easy to understand, the term 'justice' can be interpreted in different ways; it has been a prominent object of academic writing, not only in legal academia and in recent times, but also in various other fields and for hundreds of years, as will be seen in the course of this book"--