Author: Christopher Hamel-Smith
Contracts are the basic legal building blocks for all commerce. They are essential to business. Like building blocks, contracts can be assembled into structures that range from the very simple to the most sophisticated. They provide businesses with great flexibility to allocate commercial risks and to select and adapt established legal structures, or to design new ones, according to their particular commercial needs. This is as true of e-commerce as it is of traditional business.
As we begin to engage in e-commerce, we need to understand the various legal structures that may be used for this purpose. In this way, we can adapt those legal structures, or even create entirely new ones, to add value and manage risks in the context of the particular types of e-commerce that we propose to transact. For this reason, our first step will be to examine the principles that apply to these basic legal building blocks for e-commerce i.e. the law of contract as it
