"If legal negotiations are made by email, when is the contract said to be formed? Is it when the email is sent by the offeree? Or when it arrives at the recipient's/offeror's mailbox? Or when the recipient/offeror reads the acceptance?"An excerpt from the article "Email contracts -- When is the contract formed?" by Simone Hill, in the Journal of Law and Information Science.
It's a perfectly valid question, unless we live in a Ghost in the Shell-like world where electronically-readable minds literally meet in the Internet. But for now, we should all be content with making contracts via email, "I Agree" tickboxes, and even through SMS or Facebook Chat.
We are (or should be) familiar with the Civil Code rules on offer and acceptance. The magic phrase to please law professors is "article thirteen-nineteen." One party makes an offer, and if the other party accepts it, the contract is formed. And when the acceptance is made by letter or telegram, it becomes binding only when the acceptance is made known to the offeror.
Hill, the author of the article, tries to apply these rules in an email contract scenario. But what if the offeror, intentionally or negligently forgets to check her mailbox for the acceptance email? She suggests the application of the old, common-law "Postal Acceptance Rule" (PAR).
The PAR simply deems the acceptance via letter to be constructively known to the offeror, at the time when the letter is taken out of the control of the sender -- i.e., when the letter is taken by the postman for delivery to the post office. Hill defeats the PAR through common sense. It was created during the old days of Snail Mail, and it is therefore not applicable to email, which travels at the speed of light.
But now, with the passage of the E-Commerce Act, all of this is a moot point. Chapter III thereof now provides various rules regarding the time, place and manner of formation of electronic contracts.
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