- To the contention that the advent of electronic commerce demands a near-complete jettisoning of existing laws affecting business transactions, the authors of the essays in this book answer: not so. Rather, the resolution to the challenge lies in the combination of existing legal elements from heretofore disparate disciplines, and the creation from these elements of a new field of legal principle and practice, a field that will nonetheless overlap with classical commercial law. Perhaps the most significant feature of this emerging body of law is that it is necessarily transnational, as e-commerce cannot be contained within national borders. Although there is a general consensus that what holds off line, holds on line , there are circumstances that give rise to legal issues peculiar to the information technology environment. These essays deal with some of these issues and other relevant matters, including the following: the country-of-origin principle in EU law; variations in national implementations of the European Directive on electronic signatures; civil liability of Internet service providers; negligence, damage, defective products, culpable wrongdoing and other tort issues in an on-line context; defining the moment of effectiveness of an e-mail notice; good faith and fair dealing on-line; the Internet as a zone of socially responsible spontaneity ; protection of databases - how much is too much?; international private law issues in business-to-consumer disputes; and redefining the separate realms of litigation, legal advice and rule-making as e-commerce grows in the years to come. This book elaborates and updates a staff exchange that took place in 2001 among legal scholars from the Universities of Oxford and Leiden. Its insights represent some of the best-informed thinking on the legal aspects of this all-pervasive feature of contemporary society.