To the contention that the advent of electronic commerce demands a near-complete jettisoning of existing laws affecting business transactions, the authors of the penetrating 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 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 sometimes astonishing, sometimes unsettling insights represent today's clearest, best-informed thinking on the legal aspects of this all-pervasive feature of contemporary society. E-commerce is published in cooperation with the E.M. Meijers Institute of Legal Studies of Leiden University Faculty of Law.