Jean Monnet Chair for EU Consumer Protection in Digital Markets

EUCPDM (EU Consumer Protection in Digital Markets) is a Jean Monnet Chair hosted at Paderborn University and held by David Bartlitz.

It strengthens EU Studies where they are often underrepresented by mainstreaming EU consumer policy into core business-law teaching and linking EU rules to enforcement realities and citizens’ everyday experience in digital markets. Over 36 months, EUCPDM delivers an annual teaching cycle (Winter: EU Law lecture + BA/MA seminars; Summer: Capital Markets Law framed as consumer-relevant digital market infrastructure) reaching at least 80 students per year, including many learners who would not otherwise specialise in EU Studies.

Objectives are achieved through an integrated “teach–produce–transfer” model: teaching generates annual open educational resource (OER) packages under CC BY-NC-SA (lecture units, case materials, dataset template(s), methods primer(s)) and two policy briefs per year tailored to regulators, courts, consumer organisations and industry. Dialogue beyond academia is institutionalised through an annual hybrid EUCPDM Forum/Policy Roundtable (≥20 external participants; ≥4 stakeholder groups), complemented by civil-society-facing public formats to bring EU consumer protection closer to citizens.

Methodologically, EUCPDM combines doctrinal EU law with welfare-oriented law-and-economics reasoning and a replicable empirical-legal toolkit (“Digital Fact Research in Law”) to support evidence-informed assessment of EU policy choices (e.g., platform intermediation, dark patterns, personalisation and data-driven scoring, digital payments and retail finance). Monitoring follows a semester-based KPI dashboard. Sustainability is ensured through curriculum embedding, an OER maintenance routine and continued outreach beyond EU funding. European added value stems from cross-border digital markets and the EU’s harmonised policy response. Outputs and methods are designed for transfer and reuse across EU highereducation and practitioner networks.