Consumer Credit Redux

Abstract

Consumer credit law was a hot topic for legal scholars during the 1970s and 1980s, but its attraction waned in the next two decades, no doubt due in part to the dampening effect of the law and economics movement on government intervention and its advocacy. However, the last five years have seen a resurgence of scholarly interest in consumer credit law. This is partly because recent market developments have given academics a range of interesting new issues to address and partly because the new generation of legal scholars is economically literate and has been able to draw successfully on developments in law and economics, behavioural economics, and other new theoretical perspectives to enrich the debate over the case for regulation. This essay surveys the recent literature on three topics – sub-prime lending, credit cards, and payday loans – with particular reference to the challenges developments in these areas pose for truth-in-lending laws and policies that, at least until very recently, had remained largely unchanged since the heyday of consumer credit law reform.