The Transatlantic Seminar on Consumer Law, Technology, and Inequality is a joint initiative of five partners: the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law, the Yale Law School Center for the Study of Private Law, Jagiellonian University in Kraków, the Free University in Berlin, and the European University Institute in Florence. The seminar seeks to create a space for sharing knowledge, ideas, and experience across geographic and professional boundaries, with a special emphasis on bringing US and European scholars, policy-makers, and social activists together. Each session will combine speakers who rarely appear together but share interests at the intersections of law, economics, and society.

Two fundamental themes run through all the sessions. First, consumer law has a larger role to play in combatting rising economic and social inequalities and promoting social justice than the conventional wisdom recognizes. And second, a rising “legal tech for good” movement promises to empower consumers and consumer organizations by increasing their capacity for providing meaningful oversight of market actors and for enforcing consumer rights. We believe that a rigorous understanding of the practical problems that contemporary consumers face, and also of the legal environment in which they operate, is essential in order for consumer law and tech fully to realize their potential to combat inequality.