A Study On The Application Of Civil Procedure Law In The Settlement Of Consumer Disputes

In the modern commodity society with the economic field increasingly broadening, new consumer products and consumption patterns are emerging in an endless stream. The point and side of the conflicts between the consumer and the business operator are expanding dramatically. The consumer group dispute involves almost all the areas of consumption. With the dispute becoming more large-scale, more complicated and having collective trend, more and more consumers appear in groups in the social and economic life. If the consumer group disputes which are in large scale and range couldn’t be settled in a reasonable and legitimate way, the consumers’legitimate rights and interests wouldn’t be effectively safeguarded, and the limited judicial resources couldn’t be taken full advantage of, which might lead to violent social clash and do harm to the construction of a harmonious society. Nowadays, in response to the consumer group dispute, the related solutions in the civil procedure law of our country mainly consist of ordinary civil procedure, representative litigation, and public interest litigation system, the three of which intersect and overlap each other in a lot of aspects and have each its own advantages and disadvantages. But the ordinary consumers lack professional distinguishing ability, which makes them perplexed in safeguarding their rights. This paper compares and contrasts the different solutions to the consumer group dispute in the civil procedure law by contrastive study and analysis with an aid of law hermeneutics and the economics of the law. It aims to make the consumers make a sense of the characteristics and requirements of different solutions, to enable them to choose the proper litigation system for the specific case in protecting their rights, to have a definite object in view, to take part in the lawsuit efficiently and rapidly and settle the dispute. The paper consists of three parts. Part Ⅰ deals with the particularity of the consumer group dispute, introduces the topic through two typical cases of the consumer group dispute, and explains the uniqueness from its definition, characteristics, and the value pursuit. Part Ⅱ theoretically states the respective characteristics and issues of ordinary civil procedure, representative litigation, and public interest litigation system. Part Ⅲ, from the consumers’ point of view, demonstrates the possibilities of the consumers’ selective application in practice and its concrete referential factors in practical application, by combining the previous two parts.