The crime of misleading advertising in Spain: some criminal and political considerations regarding the protected legal right.

Abstract

New advertising techniques have a greater capacity to influence consumer behavior, which places the latter at a clear disadvantage with respect to companies; if, moreover, the advertising is misleading, the risk for consumers is high and, therefore, it is necessary to increase their protection to the same extent. Such protection must be provided by the State through the law, but the analysis of this need for protection and the determination of the way in which it should be carried out involves examining the role of the different branches of the legal system for this purpose and, in particular, that of criminal law, whose intervention must be evaluated, in the first place, from an eminently political-criminal perspective.