Information law in Swiss legal culture

This volume is part of the Anthology of Swiss Legal Culture. It discusses the relatively new field of information law which was induced by profound changes and progress in information technology in recent decades. The book contains some twenty representative texts of significant and at times seminal importance. Following the structure of the Anthology, each of these texts is introduced by a background note and followed by additional comments as well as biographical references and biographies of authors. A homogenous approach governing information law issues so far has not been developed. This is due to the fact that information law is a cross-sectional discipline, making it inevitable to apply an interdisciplinary approach (leading to the reprint of texts written by IT-experts in this volume). In addition, a phenomenological way of looking at issues is also necessary since information law has spillover effects on other normative areas such as data protection, contract/liability law, competition/intellectual property law and e-government issues. During the last ten years, information law has been increasingly overlapped by Internet law obviously having a broad scope and encompassing a wide variety of topics. The new technological developments still need to be embedded into a structural framework designed by the main information law themes. Such a normative framework should enshrine elements for an internationalization of policy considerations, elements for a multi-layer regulatory approach with multi-stakeholder participation, and elements for consensus on substantive guiding principles.