The Consequences of the Digitalization of Civil Transactions: From the Transformation of Law to Situational Regulation

Drawing upon the theoretical and methodological foundations of civil law scholarship, the author analyzes the challenges and consequences of the digital transformation of civil transactions. The article concludes that as technological modernization expands and deepens, the transformation of relations within the digital environment—inevitably accompanied by gaps in their legislative regulation—objectively triggers a process of diminishing certainty in civil law’s regulatory impact on digital relations. This development signals a paradigmatic shift in prevailing conceptions regarding the orientation and method of civil law regulation. The author substantiates the conclusion that the future of private law regulation under conditions of digitalization lies in the emergence of new forms of governance, including the increasing use of “soft law” instruments. Given the specific features of the digital environment and the continuous evolution of information technologies, there are grounds to anticipate that one of the stable trends in the regulation of digital private-law relations will be a transition from formal statutory regulation—moving from absolutely determinate norms to relatively determinate ones, that is, from general and abstract rules through situational (causal) regulation toward individualized and concrete legal solutions—to nonbinding regulatory mechanisms, including soft law and various forms of self-regulation.

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