Michelle Liu is working on a dissertation with the working title 'Digital vulnerability in European and Chinese private law'.
About this project
At the moment, EU law does not entirely capture consumer vulnerability in the digital age. Digital architecture challenges the assumptions that the current perception of the consumer is built upon. Consumer vulnerability in today's society is fluid and context dependent, and therefore, difficult to crystallise in EU law's traditional fixed categories. The rapid digitalisation of society prompts us to re-think what consumer vulnerability actually is, going beyond the labels that the EU legislator has been working with so far.
Thus, this PhD research will revolve around the novel concept of digital vulnerability. As literature on this is scarce, the aim of this research is to explore the outlines of this concept and its possible merit to EU consumer law.
This project will also research Chinese law on this topic, as Chinese laws related to digitalisation seem to rely on the EU’s legislative experiences. Thus, Chinese law is dogmatically interesting in the context of digital vulnerability.