Who Teaches Consumer Law?

Abstract

This paper reports on a survey of 31 law professors teaching consumer protection law conducted in connection with the Center for Consumer Law & Economic Justice at the UC Berkeley School of Law and the Center for Consumer Law at the University of Houston Law Center’s 2024 Teaching Consumer Law Conference. Surveys posed at previous editions of the Teaching Consumer Law Conference focused largely on what topics are covered in consumer law courses. The 2024 iteration of the survey instead explored responding professors’ goals in consumer law courses and experiences with and views on consumer law matters. Among the findings: nearly every respondent saw it as important that students hear arguments the professor disagreed with. While professors generally saw it as important that students learn the legal doctrines, professors as a group saw it as even more important that students learn problem-solving skills, how to work with statutes and regulations, and the policy justifications underlying the rules—suggesting that consumer law professors share the traditional view that a key purpose of law school is to teach students to think like lawyers. Two-thirds of the consumer law professors have represented a consumer in a dispute with a business while nearly half have represented a business in a consumer matter. Not one professor—not even those who had represented businesses--thought the country has too much consumer regulation while 70% thought it had too little.