Payment Systems, Consumer Tragedy, and Ineffective Remedies

(Excerpt) This Article engages how those social considerations interact with commercial contracting principles and payments policies to recommend an over-arching narrative of fairness. At the core is the desire to create balance amongst the competing interests, while recognizing the role that risk and access should play in defining the legal remedies available to consumers. To do so, the Article attempts to understand the competing interests represented by different constituents of SVPs, including consumers and merchants. In particular, the Article attempts to tell a story of two different types of consumers.

The first is one whom we might not care much about, except that we likely identify more closely with this one than the other. The other is one whom we should care about but whose interests are rarely protected adequately, and to be sure, when they are protected, it is not without a significant cost.