Consumer sales law has been a demanding topic for both practising lawyers and legal scholars in the last decade because of the frequency of fundamental legislative changes and precedents set by the European Court of Justice. This particularly holds true for Germany, which in the past – and particularly with the Consumer Rights Directive 2011/83/EU – did not, and still does not, implement European Directives in a word for word manner, but tries to implement the European rules into the national system and terminology. Several legislative acts adjusting the original implementations have become necessary to correct these deviations in wording and system, when the ECJ has decided that the original transposition was contrary to European law.

Therefore, the implementation of the Consumer Rights Directive 2011/83/EU has also become a demanding task and only some of the issues discussed and re-discussed may be presented here. One of the peculiarities of implementing EU Consumer Law Directives into German law since 2002 had been the integration of European Consumer Law into national general sales law and general contract law. This was one of the basic decisions taken by the legislator when reforming the German Civil Code and implementing the Consumer Sales Directive 1999/44/EC in 2002 and this decision had been maintained in the following changes of the Civil Code. One characteristic consequence of this particularity has been a Civil Code that is permanently under (re-)construction.

THE IMPLEMENTATION OF THE CONSUMER RIGHTS DIRECTIVE 2011/83/EU

The first draft s for the implementation for the Act implementing the Consumer Rights Directive were presented rather early in 2013. The reason for the hurry was the threat of the German general elections in Autumn 2013 for which a kind of stoppage in most legislative processes was predictable (and which in fact took place until the middle of 2014). Therefore, the official draft by the Federal Government was presented on 6 March 2013. The legislative procedure moved at a rather fast pace and the final act was published in the official journal on 27 September 2013. Therefore, changes to several acts and in particular to the German Civil Code entered into force in time on 13 June 2014.