In January 1975, the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act became law, imposing, for the first time, the forceful hand of federal regulation on the content of consumer product warranties. Prior to the passage of the Warranty Act, warranty content had remained within the jurisdiction of the individual state legislatures. Indeed, scarcely a decade earlier, 49 of the 50 state legislatures had completed the most comprehensive reform of sales law in the country's history: the enactment in each state of the identical statute, the Uniform Commercial Code. The Code, however, establishes only a structure for the effectuation of agreements between buyers and sellers and has little direct effect on warranty content. The Warranty Act, on the other hand, is designed as a powerful regulatory instrument for the influence of warranty terms for the benefit of consumer buyers. The Act prescribes specific provisions that must be included in consumer warranties, and it delegates authority to the Federal Trade Commission both to enforce these prescriptions and to promulgate rules and regulations for specific industries.

Despite the differences between the methods of the Warranty Act and the Commercial Code, however, the Congress chose to build upon the provisions of the Code rather than to scrap them. Thus, to predict the effects of the Warranty Act, one must compare carefully consumer rights and remedies under the Uniform Commercial Code with the rights and remedies created by the Warranty Act.