The research seeks to provide a building block, alongside the three PhD-projects, for the development of a new conception of 'the consumer' in European private law. The project focuses on contract and tort as the main areas of harmonisation of EU consumer law. The identity of the 'average consumer', which EU law constructs for its legal subjects, is confronted with the manifestations of consumer identities in German and Polish law. What lessons can be drawn from national laws and scholarship? For example, could a new framework of consumer protection pay more attention to the identities that consumers already have, and how they are linked to vulnerability, on the one hand, and sustainable consumption, on the other? Or could the study of domestic laws offer a cautionary tale?