Legal Research

Is eCommerce law different?

By Vincent Gautrais

Dear slawers,

Even if I became a very very occasional contributor, and not the contributor that I was supposed to be, may I again be permitted to contact slaw’s great audience in publicizing the next event that I am co-organizing October 2nd (PM) and 3rd, 2008 named ?Is eCommerce Law different?? Behind this question, we ask ourselves if we must approach IT law in the same manner we do traditional law or rather as a ?law of the horse? as coined by Llewellyn and used by Judge Easterbrook in his debate with Lessig? Fifteen years after the birth of the modern Internet, this question has yet to find an answer. Furthermore, on top of this conceptual debate, one also wonders how to interpret the idea of technological neutrality, which was put forth as a guiding principle without ever being precisely or uniformly defined. Other practical questions also remain: are electronic contracts different from their paper counterparts? Does information security present elements which differentiate it from its traditional equivalent?

Faced with such novel queries, people in general, and the legal community in particular, often revert to models and concepts they have already learned to master. After 15 years, the time is right to revisit these models and see how well they have served us.

Might I add that Dominic Jaar will be our very ?official? blogger but we may accept some others. Even more? Proof that eCommerce is different from others legal domain, we freely invite bloggers who accept to blog during the conference about different speeches. If you are interested to do so, just contact me. In the same manner as the French bloggers Francis Pisani and Dominique Piolet, who offer some free copies of their books to each blogger accepting to comment their books on their own blog, and because of the quality of the speakers, I would like to be sure that the event will be broadcast. But be careful: there is limited availability on the site; more precisely, there are few Internet connections. So, as for domain name allocation, First-come, first-served.

The program is available online (pdf) (or html) and the website of the conference may be found here (with a specific hyperlink for registration).

One more important point: the conference is in French and English and some translation services will be available on site.

Besides my own research chair, the event is co-organized with the L.R. Wilson chair in IT and eCommerce Law, AIJA (Association internationale des jeunes avocats), and the American Bar Association ? Section of International Law.

The event was made possible due to the support of Justice Canada, Justice Quebec and the Ministère des services gouvernementaux du Quebec.

Pleasure to see you at this occasion.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on September 22, 2008 (boomark / email).