사업자의 불법행위와 소비자피해에 대한 민사적 구제제도에 관한 연구-미국의 주소비자보호법을 중심으로-

According to the traditional civil law system, the Korean law system separates civil torts and crimes: crimes are “public” and torts “private.” Under the Korean law, tort law is concerned solely with compensation whereas criminal law is concerned solely with compensation. As a result, injured persons’ remedy is the problem of civil remedy procedures, and the wrongdoers’ punishment and the deterrence of their unlawful conducts is the problem of administrative deposition and criminal punishment. For this reason, in Korea, statutory damages or punitive damages in civil action are not generally allowed. Thus, injured consumers are only able to demand the restitution for actual damages, through a complicated civil procedure. In the civil action, consumers should prove their actual damages to recover their damages. 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 consumer to bring small claims to courts. To make consumer action practical and economical, the majority of American state consumer laws provide for one or more of treble damages, punitive damages, or statutory minimum damages, and class actions. In addition, many state consumer laws adopted one-way fee shifting rule on attorney fee in consumer actions. Therefore, this paper comparatively introduced and analyzed American consumer laws to plug the holes in consumer fraud enforcement. This paper asserted the necessity to introduce statutory damages and class in the area of Korean consumer laws. Korea adopts the loser pay rule on attorney fee in civil action, but as far as consumer claims are concerned, the rule is not effective because the award of attorney fee has a statutory cap. Thus, this paper emphasized that Attorney fee shifting should be enhanced to make small claims such as consumer complains more practical. However, this paper expressed the negative opinion regarding the introduction of pure punitive damages because of constitutional problems such as due process and proportionality.