소비자피해구제의 실효성 보장을 위한 법정손해배상제도의 도입에 관한 연구 - 미국 주소비자보호법을 중심으로-

According to the traditional civil law system, the Korean law system separates civil punishment and criminal punishment: redress or punishment. Accordingly, Korean consumer laws delegate injured consumers’ remedy to civil remedy procedures, and the wrongdoers’ punishment and the deterrence of their unlawful conducts are placed in the role of administrative deposition and criminal punishment. Unlike America, in Korea, statutory damages or punitive damages are not generally allowed. Thus, injured consumers are only able to demand the restitution for actual damages, through a complicated civil procedure. Consumers should prove his or her actual damages to recover their damages in the civil action. However, while the damage sustained by each individual consumer is relatively small, litigation fees of individual suits are quite high. Accordingly, It is not expected for individual consumers to bring small claims to courts. In addition, Administrative agency lacks sufficient resources to enforce every consumer law vigorously. Also, since consumer laws limit the maximum of administrative penalty or criminal fine, unfair results that do not claw back businesses’ fraudulent gainsoccurs. If consumers do not bring the claim against the business, or administrative enforcement is not enough to stop businesses from doing deceptive conducts, businesses can keep millions in profits obtained from their illegal activity. This result is contrary to justice. Therefore, this paper introduced and analyzed American consumer laws to plug the holes in consumer fraud enforcement. For instances, many American consumer laws, especially state consumer laws, provide for one or more of treble damages, punitive damages, or statutory minimum damages, and class actions. Among these, this paper asserted the necessity to introduce statutory damages in the area of Korean consumer laws. Particularly, if statutory damages cannot be generally introduced in the Korean consumer laws, they will first have to be codified in the area of food and medical substance to protect consumers’ health from unsanitary food and illegal drugs.