PATERNALISM IN CONSUMER LAW.

When carried out by the state, paternalism was often decried as coercive, questioning in itself the liberty of the individual and always alluding to the latter’s presumed incapacity to decide and to choose. Paternalism claims that most individuals are not capable to decide for themselves and argues that authority should take much of this burden off their shoulders. At its most basic level, consumer law is a special area of law dealing with protection of a universal status and that is why many of the protective measures can be seen as paternalistic, although even a kernel of truth couldn’t resist to a real analysis. The paper starts from the observation that both opponents of the idea of protection, and ardent followers of paternalism extended to the widest possible area, has the same tendency to wrongly generalize the paternalistic qualification of almost any element of protection. The paper addresses three issues: paternalism – coercive and non-coercive, libertarian paternalism and paternalistic libertarian nudges, consumer law and its specific protection with special regard to consumer status, and the crossing area between consumer law and paternalism. The main purpose of this study is to convey an objective clear method to distinguish this crossing area between consumer law and paternalism and what exactly in this area is actually of a real paternalistic substance and what is not genuine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]