California's UCL: Still too expansive?

Eugene S. Suh, Comment, Stealing From the Poor to Give to the Rich? California's Unfair Competition Law Requires Further Reform To Properly Restore Business Stability, 35 Southwestern University Law Review 229 (2006). What is it with all these law journals with outdated webpages? There’s no reason articles shouldn’t be available on the free internet soon after publication. [/complaint]

But not the end of Suh’s complaints. As the title of his piece indicates, he thinks California’s UCL hasn’t been cut back enough. He wants an intent requirement (though his reasoning about trivial violations really supports a materiality requirement instead), exemptions for heavily regulated industries (quick: name a non-heavily-regulated consumer industry, or at least an industry over which little statutory ink has been spilled), and the excision of the word “act” from the prohibition on “any unlawful, unfair, or fraudulent business act or practice,” because there’s no need to penalize conduct that’s already ended (that’ll surely decrease litigation over the scope of the statute). More generally, he wants the UCL to return to its “original legislative intent,” though what he seems to mean is that he wants the UCL to go away: he argues that the UCL is unnecessary given that businesses have other sources of law to fight unfair competition and consumers have the Consumer Legal Remedies Act.