May 12, 2008

More News & Events   |   Home Recent Grad's Article On Protecting Internet Purchases Published in Fordham Journal If you purchase a rare coin on Ebay from someone who knows as little about numismatics as you do, what protections do you have? An article by a recent graduate, Daniel K. Wiig, addressing the problems of our dated commercial laws and their application in cyber-transactions was accepted for publication by the Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law in its spring 2007 issue. “Do the Article 2 Warranties Sufficiently Protect Internet-Based Transactions with Unprofessional Internet Merchants?” was written when Wiig was an International Business Law Fellow for an independent study assignment supervised by Professor Edward Janger. Wiig is now a judicial law clerk for State Supreme Court Justice Richard B. Lowe III in the Commercial Division, a court devoted to complex business litigation. The idea for the article occurred to him while he was online, visiting such person-to-person sales sites as Ebay. He wondered if Article 2, first drafted in the 1950s, affords protections when dealing at a distance with “unprofessional merchants,” as he dubbed them. For example, does the law take into account an internet transaction with a layperson who offers a rare coin for sale that is in “mint condition,” although it is not what a professional would consider “mint,” a term with a specific meaning in the rare coin lexicon? In his article, Wiig reviews the law and asserts that “knowledge and expertise, the foundational elements for Article 2’s warranties, are not necessarily present in internet-based transactions.” He goes on to discuss why Article 2 must evolve and adapt, and offers suggestions for amendments and additions to the code. Wiig was an evening division law student who worked for the first two years of law school at Thomson Financial as a strategic relationship manager. He then joined Ernst and Young LLP as a law clerk in the General Counsel’s office for two years, with a hiatus for the summer of 2005, when he joined the New York Stock Exchange’s Division of Market Surveillance. He received his B.S. degree from St. John’s University and an M.B.A. from Fordham University. As an IBL Fellow, he said, “I was given the invaluable opportunity to attend symposia, lectures, special breakfasts, and to meet a broad spectrum of very interesting people in law and in business world.” His clerkship at the Commercial Division has been “a wonderful experience in legal writing,” he said. “In addition, I get to see the practice of law up close, which doesn’t often happen when you’re first starting out. I see both good and bad lawyering, and learn what to emulate when the day comes that I’m out in front of the bench.”

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