Preface to Automobile Lemon Laws: An Annotated Bibliography

Without a doubt, the automobile represents the most important consumer product in America. An individual's investment in a car is often only exceeded by that individual's investment in a house. ' In contemporary society, the automobile is more of a necessity than a luxury.2 Because of the automobile's great impact on daily life, state legislatures, as well as the Congress, have en-acted statutes, known as "lemon laws, " to provide con-sumers with certain protections from recurring manufac-turing defects in automobiles. ' Although the particulars of lemon laws differ from state to state, the statutes have primarily the same goal: to permit consumers to rescind a purchase of an automobile that routinely suffers from the same defect.4 These laws have been the source of muc