Abstract

The commercial relations of merchants have been affected widely by the invention of the new methods of communications, such as the Internet. Nowadays, merchants across the world accept the presence of technology voluntarily in their daily transactions. Thus, the mode of making contract, in particular international commercial contracts in large scales, has been shifted form traditional ways to electronic methods. In consequence, many legal questions have been arisen. The way of application of rules on conclusion of contracts in the paper-based world, such as the time of conclusion of contracts, to the formation of electronic contracts is one of the main issues that much ink has been spilled on by legislators and legal scholars so far. This paper scrutinizes the time of conclusion of electronic contracts under the UNCITRAL rules as an international instrument, American and English law as two representatives from the common law world and Iranian law as a civil law system. It tries to elaborate the different and similar approaches of these set of rules in determining the time of concluding traditional contracts, and then the way of application of the outcome, coupled with the provisions of legislation on electronic commerce, to electronic contracts to determine their time of conclusion. Finally, it concludes that the electronic environment must adopt its basic rules from the physical environment.

Keywords: e-commerce, e-contract, e-communication, data message, information system.

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