Collective Enforcement of Consumer Law

In the 1970s and 1980s, the consumer rights movement in Europe primarily focussed on improving consumer rights by way of changing the substantive law. Moreover, from the second half of the 1980s onwards, consumer law increasingly became of interest to the European Union. In the eyes of the European Commission, consumer law was and is instrumental to the establishment and completion of the internal market. As a result of this instrumentalist view of consumer law, the emphasis in European consumer