Personalization of the Law and Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts

Unfair terms law as an area of consumer contract law becomes more and more important and, within the European context, new forms of enforcement are discussed in order to augment the level of effectiveness of consumer protection. Personalization of the law could have a significant impact on the way in which the unfairness control of clauses may be exercised by Courts and Authorities and augment its efficiency. In fact, at least in the European context, default rules are the main basis used to assess whether a term is unfair. Therefore, the paper investigates if a ‘personalization of the law’ or the creation of ‘microdirectives’ could have an impact in the way in which problems related to standard form contracts and consumer protection are tackled.