Electronic Bills Of Lading, The Circulation Of Legal Research

Bill of lading has become the cornerstone in international trade and transportation. In particular, its function as document of title, greatly promoting the development of international trade transactions from the physical transaction to the documents transaction, has laid a sound legal basis for international trade and prosperity. However, the traditional bill of lading has shortcomings such as turnover slowly and easy to fraud. In order to change this situation, with the globalization of electronic commerce, electronic bill of lading has been used in practice,the first program is SeaDocs program, the follows is Bolero program in the field of sea transportation, in the legislate, the International Maritime Committee in 1990 adopted the "Rules for Electronic Bills of Lading", the International Maritime Committee and the United Nations Commission of goods has drafted the Convention on the Law of the United Nations Transport trying to uniformity of transport law and the rules since 2001, these efforts provided favorable conditions on the widespread use of electronic bills of lading.Although the electronic bill of lading greatly save labor costs and speed up the transfer speed of the bill of lading and the use of encryption technology also ensure the authenticity of the bill of lading, effective to eliminate a variety of fraudulent activities, However, there are still many obstacles that the electronic bill of lading could completely replace the traditional paper-based bill of lading, Therefore, this article attempts to probe how to structure the legal system in the negotiability of electronic bills of lading by analysis existing international legislation of electronic bills of lading and business practices.Based on the electronic bill of lading substantial different from paper bill of lading, this article first discuss the definition of electronic bills of lading and point out, in order to realize true function of the traditional paper bill of lading, which legal obstacles may be encountered. After that, introduced the SeaDocs program in 1983, the CMI Rules for Electronic Bills of Lading in 1990 and Bolero electronic mechanism for the specific content of the bill of lading in 1999, analysis of the success of these programs or the causes of failure, and then analysis and discussion the relevant provisions of the electronic bill of lading of United Nations Draft Convention on the Law of the International Transport which are being considered for adoption ,point out that the existing deficiencies. This article also describes the use of electronic bills of lading and legislation in maritime law in China, Finally, to realization of the negotiability of electronic bills of lading legal mechanism, the author raise a point of recommendation and expect that the international and national legislative bodies could make reference to the successful and failure experience from business practice of electronic bills of lading , sure the legal status of electronic bills of lading, set up a sound mechanism for the negotiability of electronic bills of lading to adapt the needs of information technology in the field of sea transportation.