Seán Mac Cann looks at how EU legislators are ensuring that transactions based on our common currency will be under-pinned by a common regulatory treatment of online contracts.
A variant of this article was originally published in the May 2001 edition of The Law Society Gazette, the official journal of the Law Society of Ireland.
The European Council held in Lisbon on 23/24 March 2000 set an ambitious objective - namely, that Europe should become the most competitive and dynamic economy in the world. These lofty objectives needed to be founded on, among other things, EU-wide legal consistency in the key area of providing a consistent regulatory framework for online contracts. Legally, the scale of this undertaking was complicated from the outset by much residual commercial and consumer mistrust of the very concepts of (1) online contracts and (2) electronic signatures. Whilst the EU's legislators have addressed such text-book legal issues as a fundamental necessity; they are
