The aim of this edited collection of essays is to examine the relationship between private law and power-both the public power of the state and the 'private' power of institutions and individuals. Its objectives are to describe and critically assess the way that private law doctrines, institutions, processes, and rules express, moderate, facilitate, and control relationships of power. The aim is to scrutinise this subject from the viewpoints of both history and modernity. The various chapters of this work examine the dynamics of the relationship between private law and power from a number of...

Consumer law, particularly consumer credit law, is characterised by increasingly complex regulation in Western economies. Reacting to the Global Financial Crisis, governments in the UK, the EU, Australia, New Zealand and the United States have adopted new laws dealing with consumer credit, responsible lending, consumer guarantees and unfair contracts. Drawing together authors from all of these jurisdictions, this book analyses and evaluates these initiatives, and makes predictions as to their likely success and possible flaws.

This book brings together a wide range of contributors from across the common law world to identify and debate the principal moral and systemic challenges that are likely to face private law in the remaining part of the twenty-first century. The various contributions identify serious problems relating to complexity and overload, threats to research and education, the law's unintelligibility, the unsatisfactory nature of the law reform process, and a general lack of public engagement. The contributors consider the respective future roles of statutes, codes, and judge-made law (in the form of...