Digital platforms, smart mobility and e-commerce have profoundly changed the way consumers purchase goods and services. The law, however, does not always keep pace. European consumer legislation is often based on situations that are now outdated, while new risks and market forms are emerging at a rapid rate. In her PhD dissertation, Fiona Unz, Assistant Professor of Commercial Law at Erasmus School of Law, examines how EU consumer law can be made more resilient to such technological and societal changes. She conducted her research under the supervision of Harriët Schelhaas, Professor of Private Law and Dean of Erasmus School of Law, and Wouter Verheyen, Professor of Labour Law and Transport Law at the University of Antwerp. Unz’s central message is that full ‘future-proofness’ does not exist, but that legislation can be designed in such a way that it is better able to adapt to disruption. She defended her dissertation on 10 December 2025.
Law and technology out of step
The starting point of the research lies in a structural problem. Technology develops rapidly, while legislation is often created in a fragmented manner. European policymakers increasingly acknowledge that legislation should be ‘future-proof’, but concrete tools to achieve this are often lacking. This is also true in the field of consumer protection where consumers remain exposed to new risks, while businesses face uncertainty about how existing rules should be applied to new technologies. Although Unz focuses on EU consumer law, she emphasises that the problem extends beyond this field. As she explains: “My research focuses on the issue of the different pace that technology and the law tend to follow, with technology advancing rapidly and the law evolving slowly.” According to her, this tension calls for a fundamental rethinking of how legislation is designed.
Is consumer law sufficiently adaptable?
The core question of the dissertation is whether EU consumer law is sufficiently adaptable to disruptive developments and, if not, how this adaptability can be improved. In addressing this question, Unz does not focus exclusively on new legislation but also on the quality of existing laws. Her analysis shows that several key consumer law instruments have struggled to adapt to innovations that emerged after their adoption. This applies, among others, to the Consumer Rights Directive and the European Regulation on passenger rights in bus and coach transport. These rules were drafted at a time when online platforms and smart mobility played little or no role.
Four criteria for adaptable legislation
Based on her research, Unz develops a framework consisting of four criteria that legislation should meet in order to better cope with change. The first criterion is technological neutrality. Legislation that refers too specifically to particular technologies quickly becomes outdated. As Unz herself emphasises: “Although some technological bias is unavoidably embedded in the law, unnecessary and overly specific technological references reduce adaptability.”
Flexibility plays a central role as the second criterion. According to Unz, this flexibility concerns not only the interpretation of legal rules (semantic flexibility), but also the way legislation is structured (legislative flexibility). She advocates a two-tier system. She explains: “Legislative flexibility refers to the structure of laws through two-tiers, whereby a first principle-based rule is supported by a second specific and more responsive tier, taking the form of guidance or an Annex.” This allows the core of the law to remain stable, while its practical application can more easily evolve alongside new developments.
The third criterion relates to a classic legal principle: legal certainty. Unz argues that absolute certainty in a rapidly changing society is neither achievable nor desirable. As she puts it: “Laws should aim for relative (instead of absolute) legal certainty.” This requires an open trade-off between flexibility and certainty factoring in a tolerable degree of uncertainty. In her dissertation, she distinguishes between different forms of (un)certainty, including application (un)certainty, regarding whether a provision or law applies to a set of facts; behavioural (un)certainty regarding the behavioural standards expected by the law; and contextual uncertainty, which refers to (un)certainty regarding the outcome of future legal disputes.
Finally, Unz stresses the importance of a balanced assessment of interests. According to her, adaptable legislation should not only take into account the interests of consumers and businesses, but also broader legal and societal frameworks. This requires attention to the balance among principles of EU law, coherence among legal instruments, and a consideration of societal risks. Only when these internal and external interests are kept in balance can legislation function sustainably in a changing digital market.
More than theory alone
The framework designed by Unz makes it possible both to analyse retrospectively how existing rules have responded to new developments and to look ahead to potential future challenges. By applying her criteria to different legal instruments, she assesses the adaptability of existing instruments ex-ante, or before a disruption actually emerges, which helps identify potential legal issues ahead of time. In addition, these criteria can be relied upon to design newly developed rules that can better accommodate future disruptions. Importantly, both tools can be implemented in other legal fields, in view of the methodological nature of this research. According to Unz, this combination of analysis and feedback enhances the practical usefulness of the framework. As she emphasises: “The key message of this thesis is that adaptability is not a utopic or untenable goal for EU (consumer) law, as long as it reflects the ability of the law to better withstand technological and societal changes, by reducing the distance between the law and technology. Thus, adaptability does not represent a goal of absolute future-proofness, which is in itself undesirable.”
Adaptability as a guiding principle
At its core, the dissertation revolves around a single idea: Although perfect adaptability is untenable, legislation should be more future-proof to societal and technological change. To illustrate this insight, Unz uses a vivid metaphor: “This topic can be illustrated through a growing plant symbolising innovation, and a rigid pot confining that plant, which reflects the legal framework that innovation emerges in. When the plant grows too fast, and the pot remains inflexible, cracks will appear on the pot.” According to her, continually replacing that pot by repeatedly drafting new legislation is not a sustainable solution. Instead, the legal framework should be designed to adapt to growth. As Unz argues: “We should replace that pot with one that adapts better to the growth of the plant, making the need for a new confinement less urgent.”
- Assistant professor
- More information
Read Unz’s PhD thesis here.
