Research Paper on Legal Definition of Consumers

Legally, the consumer is a person who leases or purchases services or goods for her or his own personal, household, family, or various other non-business usages. Moreover, there is no universal legal consumer definition available in the previous evidence as yet, however, the majority of the writers recommend the Rachagan definition as a proposed definition. It offers a broad aspect on 1 hand by including all who utilize the services and goods. Conversely, it implicitly keeps out the concerns of business, yet again de-linking consumers from clients.

The proposed definition is still debated as it appositively perceives and they argue that “All firms within a business have consumers as much as they are producers”. From a legal aspect, a consumer is a person who requires protection legally when dealing with a business owing to their perceived limited knowledge and weaker position in the course of entering into a certain transaction. As per the directive proposal on consumer rights, a consumer means any natural individual who acts for the purpose that is outside his profession, craft, business, and trade.

  Conversely, a trader is thought to be a legal or natural individual who for the transaction in query acts in a professional or commercial capacity. The ECJ or European justice court deliberated over the consumer definition a number of times for the purpose of clarifying its scope. DiPinto offered professionals who need to sell their businesses that can be treated as clients owing to their lack of experience in such transactions.  Hence, the ECJ usually does not accept such a subject consumer notion and they tend to reject the above-mentioned arguments.

            For this reason, the term consumer comprises all consumer protection and corporation which is extended to all the entities in the business. Here, the extended consumer meaning is curtailed which is limited to a business entity and corporations that use or need a service or product as the end-user. ECJ stated that a consumer in the light of convention needs to be interpreted as a private end client, as well as it is in no way engaged in professional & commercial activity. 

Therefore, subsequent to this ECJ interpretation, consumers need to understand it in an extremely strict sense including people whose activities are exclusively guided by households and private purposes without connections to the commercial and professional activities. Regardless of unmistakable examination of the law, there will always be borderline cases, for instance, solicitors who purchase a car for business and personal purposes. It is assumed that this kind f borderline case of the protection of consumer law will specifically apply as long as the interest of professionals is not high than the personal one.