The regulation of unfair commercial practices under EC Directive 2005/29. New rules and new techniques

This book represents the fruit of a conference held in Oxford on 3 March 2006 under the auspices of the Institute of European and Comparative Law in the Oxford University Law Faculty. Directive 2005/29 is an important new measure in the construction of a legal framework apt to promote an integrated economic space in the European Union. It establishes a harmonised regime governing the control of unfair commercial practices. As such it represents an important exercise in the use of new rules and new techniques, and therefore poses new challenges to EU lawyers. The purpose of this book is to inform and to explore the issues raised by the Directive, issues which are of academic and practical interest, in helping to understand the evolution of European consumer law within the broader programme of European market regulation. The intense practical significance of this Directive, which heralds a new regime, is likely to provoke commercial operators to seek to exploit opportunities to pursue practices previously suppressed.

Contents:
1. Introduction - Stephen Weatherill and Ulf Bernitz
2. The Unfair Commercial Practices Directive and its General Prohibition - Giuseppe B. Abbamonte
3. The Unfair Commercial Practices Directive: Its Scope, Ambitions and Relation to the Law of Unfair Competition - Ulf Bernitz
4. An End to Fragmentation? The Unfair Commercial Practices Directive from the Perspective of the New Member States from Central and Eastern Europe - Antonina Bakardjieva Engelbrekt
5. The Unfair Commercial Practices Directive in Context - Ida Otken Eriksson and Ulf Öberg
6. Unfair Commercial Practices Directive: A Missed Opportunity? - Geraint Howells
7. Who is the ‘Average Consumer’? - Stephen Weatherill
8. The Relationship of the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive to European and National Contract Laws - Simon Whittaker
9. The Unfair Commercial Practices Directive and its Consequences for the Regulation of Sales Promotion and the Law of Unfair Competition - Jules Stuyck
10. The Case for Reclaiming European Unfair Competition Law from Europe’s Consumer Lawyers - Christopher Wadlow
11. Unfair Commercial Practices: Stamping out Misleading Packaging - Vanessa Marsland
12. The Challenges Posed by the Implementation of the Directive into Domestic Law: A UK Perspective - Christian Twigg-Flesner and Deborah Parry
13. Transborder Law Enforcement: Does it Exist? - Hans W. Micklitz