Recent EU legislation has mandated the extension of comprehensive coverage of consumer dispute resolution (CDR) throughout the EU. The extension of CDR has given rise to a range of questions about the theoretical and practical implications of these changes. The field of CDR is underexplored in...

Energy poverty is a huge social problem. Academic and policy deliberations about energy poverty focus repeatedly on the same issues: the lack of a shared definition, who is responsible for the problem, and how best to measure it through indicators.We argue that debates at EU and national level...

This report is part of a University of Oxford John Fell funded collaborative project: Informality and the Media in Consumer Protection in Emerging Economies. This pilot project seeks to shed light upon consumer complaint behaviour through social media in emerging economies

This chapter provides an overview of the most successful ADR model in the EU for resolving consumer disputes: the ombudsman model. After introducing the differences and similarities of both public sector and private sector ombudsman schemes, a comparison of existing consumer ombudsman models in...

This chapter provides an overview of various trends in the development of alternative models of consumer dispute resolution in the EU. The current ADR landscape in the EU is a paradox: one of great differences but at the same time considerable similarities. This is a result of different paces of...

In this chapter I trace the development of the field of socio-legal studies over the past 50 years. In a quest for an understanding of how law, culture, and social structures interact, we travel across the globe. The study of socio-legal phenomena opens up an inquiry into a range of spaces to...

This paper summarises the findings of a study of CADR bodies in ten European Member States (Hodges C, Benöhr I, Creutzfeldt-Banda N in Consumer ADR in Europe. Hart Publishing, Oxford, 2012). It first notes the distinct nature of CADR bodies that have emerged, explains the architecture of...