E-commerce Consumer Protection

The topic on which research proposal was undertaken is “Consumer protection principles in e-commerce trade: Comparative analysis between EU laws and Sharia laws.” So far, the research process involved in this research process has been concerned with the identification of literature in this area and the identification of the gaps in this literature. The research process started with the formulation of the research question, which relates to the level of protection of e-commerce consumers under the Sharia framework law and the EU law. The research being comparative in nature, I was required to conduct my literature review related to two jurisdictions, that is, Sharia related (for which I identified Saudi Arabia as the appropriate jurisdiction) and the EU.

The first step that I undertook before starting a research on this topic was to read up on the research methodology in legal research. As this is a comparative research topic, I also focused on comparative research methodology. I was certain that adopting a field research model would not be appropriate for this research project because my goal was to identify the legal issues and the problems in the way Sharia framework laws respond to the issue of protection of e-commerce consumers and how that compares with the protections afforded under the EU law. Therefore, reading up on research methodology helped clarify a lot of my doubts about my own approach to the research, including the methods that I would adopt for the research. This led me to reading more about doctrinal research methods and comparative research methods as I was able to identify these two methods as the primary methods that would be involved in my own research project. This helped me identify the sources of data that would be relevant to my research. The data sources identified included both primary and secondary sources. Primary sources would include the legislations in both the EU and Saudi Arabian context that relate to the protection of consumers in e-commerce. As the EU jurisdiction is being explored in this research, EU directives are also relevant as primary sources of data. Also relevant as primary sources of data for this research is the case law. Therefore, the three primary sources of data identified were the legislations in Saudi Arabia and EU, EU directives, and case law in both the jurisdictions. At the same time secondary sources of data were also identified. These are books, articles from peer reviewed journals, and institutional reports on the topic. At this stage, after understanding the methods of legal research and understanding how these methods are to be applied and what sources would form the part of the data, I was able to feel somewhat confident about the research project as I felt that I had at least been able to lay down the basics of the research process and identified the kind of sources that I was required to research. However, the bigger challenge was to locate the sources.

I chose to conduct my research for the sources on online databases. I felt that this would give me access to sources from both the EU and Saudi Arabia. I formulated a search string each for Saudi Arabia as well as the EU. The search string both searches included the following key words: consumer protection AND e-commerce AND EU/ consumer protection AND e-commerce AND Saudi Arabia. These searches yielded a number of results, which I narrowed down by limited my search to articles after 2005 only. I thought that a 15 year period should be sufficient to explore the literature on this subject matter. As this was only a preliminary literature review for the proposal, my focus was on identifying whether there were sufficient data sources to do this research and whether I was able to make out any gaps in Saudi Arabia laws on e-commerce protection that justify this research and comparative study with the more advanced EU laws. I ascertained that EU laws were advanced as compared to Saudi Arabia in the preliminary literature review because the EU has already responded to some key issues in consumer protection in e-commerce through laws and directives, which is missing in the Saudi Arabian legislation. Therefore, I felt confident that the research was justified because there is a gap in the Sharia inspired framework on e-commerce laws and protection of consumers under these laws. This made me feel better as I did have some doubts about the research topic earlier and was not sure whether I was on the right track or not. Knowing that there is literature on EU laws also made me feel more confident because I aim to use this literature for identifying the principles of consumer protection in e-commerce transactions that are already applicable to the EU jurisdiction. There are laws, directives, case laws and secondary commentary on the same including in a number of reputed peer reviewed journals. Then after these principles are identified, I will research on how far similar principles are also found in the Sharia inspired framework of the Saudi Arabian laws.

Conducting this research for the proposal has also made me realise a few shortcomings in my own knowledge. The first shortcoming is that I am not as well versed with research methodology as I would like to be. The good thing about this project was that I was able to read more about research methodology. I now understand doctrinal and empirical research better and also in what king of projects are these different methodologies appropriate to use. Thus, where I would be interested in exploring the social impacts of laws, an empirical method would be more appropriate. In the current research proposal where my interest is to identify gaps in the law by comparing it to another jurisdiction, a doctrinal approach is appropriate along with a comparative research method. Using a comparative method, I can explore two jurisdictions and compare them to note their similarities and dissimilarities. I can also suggest areas of reform based on this process.