By Cătălin-Gabriel Stănescu, Associate Professor in Private Law, University of Southern Denmark. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2025) xx + 253 pp, open access; hardcover £100.00.

Consumer protection is a broad discipline. It’s about everything that affects the lives of the individual, including food safety and security, clean water, clean air and access to essential services. A subset of this multifaceted subject is legal protection, which can be further sub-divided. Two facets which have relatively high visibility are contractual protection and data protection. But contractual and other rights are hollow if we don’t have an inclusive vision of consumer protection. Thus, to secure consumer protection holistically, we need access to justice. Another essential cog in the wheel is the subject of this book—fair debt collection, a subject which Cătălin-Gabriel Stănescu has made his own. It is an easily neglected but important subject, given its size and impact on the lives of many. If we are sincere in our commitment to the ideal of consumer protection, the subject must receive academic attention. Stănescu offers us an understanding of the subject in this book, specifically the informal debt collection sector, a multi-billion-dollar industry.

The regional focus of the book is the European Union. Elsewhere, Stănescu has looked at other regions, including most recently, South East Asia and Australia. Any regional study such as this poses challenges and opportunities: different languages, legal frameworks, and cultural norms. Even with the unification that the EU has achieved, the difference between its component parts is considerable, particularly given the nature of the book, which takes a holistic look at the informal debt collection sector by showing its location and linkages in a much bigger machine. Stănescu has done an excellent job of giving us an insight into the machine, with its many moving parts, as well as a detailed examination of the EU legal framework in which the industry operates.

The book starts with examples of abusive debt collection practices in Croatia, Greece, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Spain and Sweden, which places us in the midst of the problem which Stănescu is addressing, and brings home the point that it is an EU-wide issue. However, the title of the book, Failure by Design, tells us that it is not a book of anecdotes; quite the contrary. It uses a wide-angle lens to probe the deficiencies in the EU legal framework, the reasons for it, and the damaging consequences from it. It is central to Stănescu’s message that the informal debt collection sector cannot be seen in isolation. It is part of a much bigger and, he argues, problematic phenomenon.

While one suspects that Stănescu would favour more fundamental changes, he ultimately accepts the basic features of the credit ecosystem in which the debt