Suggested Citation: Peer Zumbansen, Contracting in the Internet: German Contract Law and Internet Auctions, 2 German Law Journal (2001), available at http://www.germanlawjournal.com/index.php?pageID=11&artID=65 “One Click, one buy, delivery within 48 hours”. Similar offers for goods of all kinds are common to the internet today. And yet, there is a great number of intricate problems involved with doing business in the internet. The uncertainties of doing business online have prompted an abundance on legislation, both on the European as well as the national level. Still, when turning to the courts for a clear doctrine of, say, the conclusion of contracts in the internet, there remains a considerable void. Cases addressing the question whether the fundamental contract rules apply to internet transactions have generally answered in the affirmative. But when the particularities of contractual governance in the internet are involved, the jurisprudence grows thin. In this respect two recent decisions by lower Courts in Germany that deal with the question of internet-auctions, merit closer attention. The Landgericht Münster's (Regional Court of the city Münster) ruling from the beginning of last year provoked considerable irritation and thereby illuminated how much the field remained in need of intensive judicial attention. In the same time period, the Amtsgericht Sinsheim (Local Court of the city Sinsheim) had simply affirmed conclusion of contract through an onlineauction in a similar case. The decision of the Münster Court was recently overruled by the Oberlandesgericht Hamm (OLG [Higher Regional Court in the city Hamm]). The appeal of the OLG Hamm decision to the Bundesgerichtshof (BGH [Federal Court of Justice]) is still pending. Because of their importance to the rapidly growing internet market place and the largely unresolved questions regarding contract law in that realm, the Landgericht Münster and OLG Hamm decisions merit attention, especially in anticipation of the BGH's ruling on the issues they raise.

A German law known as the Stromeinspeisungsgesetz (Law on feeding electricity from renewable resources into the public grid) requires producers of electricity to purchase (at a fixed, minimum price) and pass along to electricity distributors energy produced from renewable resources in the producer's area of service. (Bundesgesetzblatt (BGBl. [Register of German Federal Law] 1990 I, p. 2633). As required by Article 88 of the Consolidated EC Treaty, the German government notified the Commission of the European Communities of the law's state aid provisions in 1990, and received authorization for those provisions from the Commission. The Commission concluded that the law was consistent with the energy policy aims of the European Communities and that its impact on the industry would be slight.

Suggested Citation:German High Courts Confront Serbian War Crimes, 2 German Law Journal (2001), available at http://www.germanlawjournal.com/index.php?pageID=11&artID=64 In two recent decisions the German federal courts engaged in the interpretation and application of international criminal and humanitarian law, pursuant to the codification of those norms in German criminal law. Both cases involved appeals of convictions secured in lower German courts against Serbs who participated in the atrocities of the Serbian ethnic-cleansing (perpetrated against Bosnian Muslims) in the then newly independent Bosnia-Herzegovina.