Responsive Regulation and Comparative Consumer Product Safety
This paper, an edited and footnoted transcript of a presentation at a research Centre of Excellence at Hokkaido University, looks at the influence of “responsive regulation” theory on the large-scale “Australian Consumer Law” reforms enacted in 2010. It outlines some frameworks developed for a chapter on “Product Safety Regulation” in the Handbook of Research on International Consumer Law (Elgar, 2010), considering ways in which the government (primarily through public regulation), courts (primarily through product liability law) and markets can create incentives to supply safe consumer goods. These frameworks also permit better cross-jurisdictional comparisons, with this paper highlighting major developments also in Japan, Europe, the United States, and international trade law. The paper ends by highlighting implications for other areas of contemporary consumer law, especially consumer credit. As in many countries nowadays regarding consumer goods, including belatedly Australia, responsive regulation theory suggests that there should be scope to add a duty on suppliers of credit to disclose serious problems or risks afflicting their consumer borrowers.
Product Safety and Liability Law in Japan: From Minamata to Mad Cows
List of illustrations Preface Acknowledgements Abbreviations 1. 'Re-orienting' Japan and its law 2. The still-birth and re-birth of product liability in Japan 3. Comparing the PL Law with other 'strict liability' regimes in Europe, Australia and the US 4. The PL Law in action 5. The future of PL in Japan: reformulations, reform and re-regulation Appendices Notes Bibliography Index
Assembled in Japan: Electrical Goods and the Making of the Japanese Consumer
"Assembled in Japan" investigates one of the great success stories of the twentieth century: the rise of the Japanese electronics industry. Contrary to mainstream interpretation, Simon Partner discovers that behind the meteoric rise of Sony, Matsushita, Toshiba, and other electrical goods companies was neither the iron hand of Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry nor a government-sponsored export-led growth policy, but rather an explosion of domestic consumer demand that began in the 1950s. This powerful consumer boom differed fundamentally from the one under way at the same time in the United States in that it began from widespread poverty and comparatively miserable living conditions. Beginning with a discussion of the prewar origins of the consumer engine that was to take off under the American Occupation, Partner quickly turns his sights on the business leaders, inventors, laborers, and ordinary citizens who participated in the broadly successful effort to create new markets for expensive, unfamiliar new products. Throughout, the author relates these pressure-cooker years in Japan to the key themes of twentieth-century experience worldwide: the role of technology in promoting social change, the rise of mass consumer societies, and the construction of gender in advanced industrial economies.