A. Introduction

Online dispute resolution (“ODR”) can be conceived as a means to achieve some of the most powerful legal ideals of the Western legal tradition. Among these are:

(1) Legal Certainty: In making individual plans, decisions, and choices everyone is entitled to know what the law is in advance. Therefore, laws shall be public, written in everyday language, and shall not be changed too often. The application of laws shall be a simple operation (legal syllogism) so that citizens do not need attorneys, and judges are just la bouche de la loi (Montesquieu).

(2) Access to Justice: Everyone involved in a dispute shall be entitled to an easily accessible redress mechanism that provides for a timely resolution and effective remedies at reasonable cost. This principle received the status of a human right when states acquired a monopoly in the legitimate use of force. For in the social contract people transferred their natural right to (violent) self-help only in return for the state’s guarantee to provide for mandatory dispute resolution mechanisms.

Of course, these ideals were never fully accomplished by any given legal system. However, as ideals do shine most brightly through their negation, frustration, or failure, it is specifically the fact of their non-realization that makes them such powerful drivers of human conduct. It so happened that the advent of modern information and communications technologies (ICT) instantly fuelled dreams of new ways to enhance the achievement of the above quoted legal ideals. As early as in the 1960ies, scholars embarked on a new discipline called legal informatics, where the guiding research idea was to replace judges by computers as the new “mouth of law” or, less ambitiously, to produce computerized expert systems in order to provide laymen with easy-to-use legal services at low cost. While these efforts were not rewarded with much success, except for a number of new law faculty chairs dedicated to the topic, the Internet as a...