AbstractsLaw & Legal Studies

Online Dispute Resolution (‘ODR’) is considered an offspring of Alternative Dispute Resolution (‘ADR’), which as its name suggests, is out-of-court dispute resolution other than litigation in the courts, including other adjudicative techniques such as arbitration and which has the advantages over litigation of greater efficiency, greater party control and lower costs. ODR, by using the information technology and communication technology is generally believed to have the same, if not more, advantages over litigation than traditional ADR. However, ODR has its own social, culture and legal hurdles, which typically lie in online arbitration. Legal hurdles primarily involved the admissibility of electronic arbitration agreement, electronic arbitral award, and online arbitration proceeding, the enforceability of electronic arbitration awards. These legal hurdles undoubtedly raise doubts on the admissibility of online arbitration in particular in China and hence impede the development of online arbitration there. As there is not any mandatory regulation restricting the use of online negotiation and online mediation; the difficulties of bringing parties to enter the processes and voluntarily execute the results, if they are not overcome, shall make these processes of little practical value. On the other hand, online consumer disputes are usually of small value, which is considered disproportionate to the time, cost and effort for a consumer to go to the court. In other words, the litigation proceeding to a great extent is not suitable for handling such small value online consumer disputes. While considering that ODR has emerged in UK for more than 10 years and the Chinese ODR is still in its infancy, even though its development in UK is not, as fast and widespread as some of the scholar predicted, there should be some experience and also some lessons that China could learn from, especially in clearing up the legal hurdles that ODR faces. Therefore this paper shall address if and to what extent the legal hurdles can be cleared up under the English and Chinese legal regimes respectively so that ODR is admissible in China and UK. Based on such analysis, the paper will then compare these two legal regimes to see if there is any deficiency in the Chinese regulations and if any experience China can learn from the English legal regime.