Law Commons^™

Written Notice Of Cooling-Off Periods: A Forty-Year Natural Experiment In Illusory Consumer Protection And The Relative Effectiveness Of Oral And Written Disclosures, Jeff Sovern

Faculty Publications

For more than forty years, a standard tool in the consumer protection toolbox has been the cooling-off period. Federal statutes, state statutes, and federal regulations all oblige merchants to give consumers three days to rescind certain contracts. This paper reports on a survey of businesses subject to such cooling-off periods. The study has two principal findings. First, the respondents indicated that few consumers rescind their purchases. Thus, the study raises doubts about whether cooling-off periods benefit consumers or whether they provide only illusory consumer protection. The article also offers speculations about why cooling-off periods have been of such little value …