ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the role that commercial law plays in facilitating or hindering the adoption of new technologies in one important context—regulating relationships among the principal stakeholders in a contract for the carriage of goods by sea. The genesis of the new regime is instead found in United Nations Commission on International Trade Law desire to facilitate electronic commerce. For electronic commerce to work—for the new technologies under discussion at the colloquium to be implemented in the present context—the commercial world needs answers that will work in the electronic context. The judicial doctrines that arise as a result are an essential part of the commercial law governing the transactions under consideration. Different sources—ranging from international conventions and domestic statutes to judicial decisions and trade practices—have supplied the answers, and those answers have not always been consistent among different jurisdictions. Customary trade practices are closely related to judicial doctrines.
