Legal Uncertainty and Electronic Markets

legal actions remains sufficiently predictable. Such predictions on legal conflicts have to be shared among economic actors to stabilize mutual expectations of behavior. This stability then helps to reduce legal risks. Predictability is not necessarily related to precise legal knowledge. It is sufficient to know when legal specialists have to get involved. Economic actors prepare for such situations by legal risk management measures, e.g. contracting legal services to monitor their economic activities. With the advent of EMs such a traditional approach has become insufficient. consensus, reliance on its capability to finally produce such consensus within an acceptable time for an acceptable time in the future is decreasing. Such difficulties not only occur in the context of IT but can be perceived in the reaction of law to technological change in general. However, the pressure on the performance of the legal system to simultaneously maintain stability (legal rules as a stable environment for economic strategies) and adaptability (adequate application of legal rules to each new individual case without the need to mobilize the complex mechanisms of changing the laws) has increased considerably. Changes in the legal environment are demanded to arrive faster and to last longer, to be finetuned and yet to remain sufficiently general, to appeal to local and sectoral customs and yet to be accepted beyond national jurisdictions.