Foreword

Foreword It is a great pleasure and honour to be asked to write a foreword to this impressive book, which is yet another timely and thoughtful set of essays compiled by James Devenney and Mel Kenny. These are becoming a welcome regular addition to the consumer law library. These essays relate predominantly to consumer credit and financial services and bear testament to the recent growth in academic interest in consumer credit law: a topic that has for a long time been relegated to the voluminous practitioner-orientated encyclopaedias. In this foreword I would like to reflect on the reasons for the growth of scholarly interest in consumer credit. Undoubtedly the adoption of a new EU Directive, which was more far reaching and intrusive on national legal systems than its modest predecessor, has been an impetus for researchers to focus on this topic. They naturally seek to understand what the Directive means both for EU consumer law and for national implementation. Indeed it seems to underline the EU emphasis on consumer law as a mechanism for market integration, with an unwillingness to move far beyond those ambitions and impose real social protection mechanisms besides information-based protection. Its maximal harmonisation agenda of course raises interesting challenges for national legislators keen to preserve as much as they can for their national laws. The limited scope of the provisions covered in the Directive equally means that in any event its market integrated goals are inevitably limited.