Law Commission Call for Evidence on digital assets and ETDs in private international law

Overview

This is a public call for evidence by the Law Commission for England and Wales.

When parties to a private law dispute are based in different countries, or the facts and issues giving rise to the dispute cross national borders, questions of private international law arise: in which country's courts should the parties litigate their dispute, and which country's law should be applied to resolve it? This project is concerned with the body of domestic law that supplies the rules to determine these questions, with a particular focus on disputes concerning crypto-tokens and electronic trade documents.

For more information about this project, click here.

We recommend that stakeholders read the call for evidence before responding to the call for evidence. A shorter summary is also available. Stakeholders do not need to answer all the questions if they are only interested in some aspects of the call for evidence.

About the Law Commission: The Law Commission is a statutory body, created by the Law Commissions Act 1965 (“the 1965 Act”) for the purpose of promoting the reform of the law. It is an advisory Non Departmental Public Body sponsored by the Ministry of Justice (MoJ). The Law Commission is independent of Government. For more information about the Law Commission please click here.

Responses to this call for evidence: We aim to be transparent in our decision-making, and to explain the basis on which we have reached conclusions. We may publish or disclose information you provide in response to Law Commission papers, including personal information. For example, we may publish an extract of your response in Law Commission publications, or publish the response itself. We may also share responses with Government. Additionally, we may be required to disclose the information, such as in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000. We will process your personal data in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation.

Call for evidence responses are most effective where we are able to report which stakeholders responded to us, and what they said. If you consider that it is necessary for all or some of the information that you provide to be treated as confidential and so neither published nor disclosed, please contact us before sending it. Please limit the confidential material to the minimum, clearly identify it and explain why you want it to be confidential. We cannot guarantee that confidentiality can be maintained in all circumstances and an automatic disclaimer generated by your IT system will not be regarded as binding on the Law Commission.​

Alternatively, you may want your response to be anonymous. That means that we may refer to what you say in your response, but will not reveal that the information came from you. You might want your response to be anonymous because it contains sensitive information about you or your family, or because you are worried about other people knowing what you have said to us.​

We list who responded to our calls for evidence in our reports. If you provide a confidential response your name will appear in that list. If your response is anonymous we will not include your name in the list unless you have given us permission to do so.​

For information about how we handle your personal data, please see our privacy notice. ​

Any queries can be directed to enquiries@lawcommission.gov.uk.

Why your views matter

We hope to draw upon the views and evidence of a wide range of stakeholders from a wide range of perspectives and jurisdictions. This includes, but is not limited to, academics, legal practitioners, technologists, and market participants in the financial, shipping and other sectors where digital assets and electronic trade documents are used. We believe that such range of views and evidence will help ensure that our work strikes the appropriate balance between the theoretical aspect of the law and its practical application.