Browsing by Author "Drobitskaya, Anastasia V."

The contracts are entered into on a daily basis. In general, a contract is a multipage document laid down in professional language. To examine this document a person has to have at least basic legal skills and/or practical experience of reading/execution of the agreements. When a consumer commits himself to an agreement, the risk of misunderstanding of contractual content appears. As a consequence, this may lead to imbalance between legal rights and obligations of the contractual parties. A drafting party may present the contract in a standard form, force a weaker party to sign the boilerplate or impose unfair terms causing harm and putting a consumer into disadvantageous position. The purpose of this paper is to make an analysis of the mainstream legal instruments in the area of consumers’ protection against unfair terms in business-to-consumer contracts, to show the reaction of legislators and researchers on application of abusive clauses, to support the study with an assessment of relevant case law. Furthermore, the thesis aims to recognize the consequences of unfair terms imposition. The research is mainly focused on the analysis of the Council Directive 93/13/EEC on unfair terms in consumer contracts and other European legal instruments which have been recently proposed. Comparative analysis of unfair contract terms regulation in various legal systems also takes place in the paper. The value of this study consists in a deep analysis of different legal and scholarly sources concerning the issue of consumers’ protection in contracts with a dominant business party, and identification of main conclusions on the problems set forth as objectives of the research.