American Law Institute names Oren Bar-Gill a reporter on Restatement Third of Consumer Contracts

The American Law Institute (ALI) has named Oren Bar-Gill a reporter on the Restatement Third of the Law of Consumer Contracts.

Bar-Gill, a specialist in the law and economics of contracts and contracting, holds this position along with Omri Ben-Shahar of the University of Chicago School of Law. The project will follow the structure of the Restatement Second of Contracts, focusing on consumer contracts and regulatory techniques applied in consumer protection law, and covering common law and statutory and regulatory law. The project will be divided into three major parts: formation of contract, obligations in the contract, and enforcement and remedies.

Last February Bar-Gill and Ben-Shahar organized an invitational conference on consumer protection at NYU Law called “Making Consumer Protection Work: Regulatory Techniques for Enforcing Consumer Protection Law.” Julie Brill ’85, commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission, presented the keynote address at the daylong event, which was sponsored by ALI and NYU Law.

Bar-Gill, who joined NYU Law in 2005, was awarded one of two inaugural ALI Young Scholars Medals in 2011 for his insights into consumer psychology and his legal solutions for problems in the markets relating to cell phones, subprime mortgages and credit cards. His upcoming book Seduction by Contract: Law, Economics, and Psychology in Consumer Markets, to be published by Oxford University Press in November, explains how consumer contracts—for everything from magazine subscriptions to mortgages—emerge from the interaction between market forces and consumer psychology.

Posted August 9, 2012.