LAW4702 Competition and Consumer Law

Workload:
3 hours of lectures per week.

Consumer Law is pretty light on content, but Competition Law is a fair bit heavier. Most of the course deals directly with legislation.

Prescribed Prerequisites/Recommended Prerequisites:
Prescribed Pre-Requisites

For students who commenced their LLB (Hons) course in 2015 or later: LAW1111; LAW1114; LAW1112; LAW1113; LAW2101; LAW2102; LAW2112; LAW2111; LAW3112 For students who commenced their LLB course prior to 2015: LAW1100 OR LAW1101 and LAW1102 or LAW1104 and LAW2102

Prescribed Co-Requisites

LAW4331.

Prohibitions

LAW4196 and LAW4318.

Assessments:
Mid-semester assignment 2,000 words (40%) and examination (2 hours writing time plus 30 minutes reading and noting time) (60%).

Recorded Lectures:
Yes.

Past exams available:
Yes.

Textbook recommended?
No.

There were two prescribed textbooks (one for consumer law and one for competition law), but neither of them was necessary.

Comments:
Semester 2, 2016

This unit was a bit hit and miss. Whether you like this unit will probably come down to whether you’re actually interested in consumer law or competition law. I would not recommend taking this unit just to fill up 6 credit points in a semester.

Consumer law

The consumer law course is fairly straightforward. You work your way through the main provisions of the ACL, including consumer guarantees, unfair terms, and misleading or deceptive conduct. Most of the assessment for the consumer law component was in the mid-semester assignment, so you could do as much or as little work as you needed.

Competition law

As an Arts/Law student, I never thought I’d be in a class where we talked about markets for as long as we did in competition law. In this component, the course moved through the main prohibitions under the ''Competition and Consumer Act 2010. ''We looked at mergers, misuse of market power, and anti-competitive agreements.

In my opinion, the competition law component is much harder than the consumer law component – for two reasons.

1.    Most of the main prohibitions involve market analysis (you have to analyse firms, products, and barriers to entry). Although this isn’t complicated for anyone with a commercial mind, it is time consuming in the exam. It’s also why competition law is one of the most expensive areas of litigation.

2.    There is a lot of legislation. To do well in the exam, you really need to get on top of the legislation early. There isn’t as much as in corporations law, but there are quite a few provisions that carve out key exceptions or enforce specific prohibitions, so you need to across them all in order to spot all the issues in an exam.

All in all, I found this unit interesting – probably because I enjoy studying most areas of law where the government plays an active regulatory role. However, this unit could be boring and slightly repetitive at times. Like I said, I would only recommend this unit to those actually interested in these two areas of law.