The Law Applicable to Consumer Contracts under the Rome I Regulation

The fact that consumers have a weaker economic and legal position vis-à-vis professionals and therefore deserve protection designed to balance out this imbalance in order to provide substantial justice (and to make the internal market a reality) seems to be a given among scholars of European private international law of contracts. Already the 1980 Convention on the Law Applicable to Contractual Obligations introduced a special conflict of laws rule (Art. 5) for the benefit of consumers. This special rule, however, has long been viewed as in need of modernization, and over the course of the Rome Convention’s “communitarization” was subject to radical reconsideration at first, which was then softened, but with the advantageous result of (re)aligning European private international law with European international procedural law regarding consumers as provided in Articles 15-17 of the Brussels I Regulation (which modified Art. 13-15 of the Brussels Convention). This paper analyzes this new conflict of laws rule; it looks first at the fundamental characteristics of the substantive sphere of application envisaged by the new rule, then at the connecting factors chosen, and, last but not least, at the rule’s relationship with other private international law provisions that may also apply to international consumer contracts.