In Consumer Protection We Trust? Re-Thinking the Legal Framework for Country of Origin Cases

Markets are becoming more complicated in an ever faster changing world. New findings pertaining to human behavior and consumer markets constantly challenge traditional legal and policy assumptions. Social science offers a myriad of insights into the ways trust, identity, ideology, and preferences interact and impact one another. Against this background, the need to advance a nuanced legal framework is increasingly vital.

Consumer law policy requires an interdisciplinary and holistic approach. Recent scholarship has acknowledged this need, proposing novel ways to enrich the academic discourse and develop consumer law policy. Along these lines, a growing body of literature examines how notions of identity and trust affect consumer behavior and how the law should respond to these phenomena. However, this body of literature is under-developed and under-theorized.

This article bridges some of this gap, proposing a well-rounded agenda that adopts a multi-dimensional approach to country of origin cases. As we illustrate throughout the article, there is more in country of origin cases than initially meets the eye. Such cases require integrating behavioral, economic, and social developments, such as people’s search for identity markers. This, in turn, yields a superior legal analysis that is applicable to the development of consumer law more generally.