Smart Legal Contracts: Computable Law in Theory and Practice

Smart Legal Contracts: Computable Law in Theory and Practice is a landmark investigation into one of the most important trends at the interface of law and technology: the effort to harness emerging digital technologies to change the way that parties form and perform contracts. While developments in distributed ledger technology have brought the topic of 'smart contracts' into the mainstream of legal attention, this volume takes a broader approach to ask how computers can be used in the contracting process.

This book assesses how contractual promises are expressed in software and how code-based artefacts can be incorporated within more conventional legal structures. With incisive contributions from members of the judiciary, legal scholars, practitioners, and computer scientists, this book sets out to frame the borders of an emerging area of law and start a more productive dialogue between the various disciplines involved in the evolution of contracts as software. It provides the first step towards a more disciplined approach to computational contracts that avoids the techno-legal ambiguities of 'smart contracts' and reveals an emerging taxonomy of approaches to encoding contracts in whole or in part. Conceived and written during a time when major legal systems began to engage with the advent of contracts in computable form, and aimed at a fundamental level of enquiry, this collection will provide essential insight into future trends and will provide a point of orientation for future scholarship and innovation.

table of content

1:Wrapped and Stacked: 'Smart Contracts' and the Interaction of Natural and Formal Language

Jason Grant Allen

2:End-to-End Smart Legal Contracts: Moving from Aspiration to Reality

Sir Geoffrey Vos MR

3:Making Smart Contracts a Reality: Confronting Definitions, Enforceability, and Regulation

Justice Aedit Abdullah, Yihan Goh

4:Smart Contracts and Dispute Resolution: Faster Horses or a New Car

Justice Stephen Estcourt AM

5:Why the Ricardian Contract Came About: A Retrospective Dialogue with Lawyers

Ian Grigg

6:Smart Contracts: Taxonomy, Transaction Costs, and Design Trade-offs

Alfonso Delgado Rius

7:Smart Legal Contracts: A Model for the Integration of Machine Capabilities and Contracts

Natasha Blycha, Ariane Garside

8:Six Levels of Contract Automation: Further Analysis of the Evolution to Smart Legal Contracts

Susannah Wilkinson, Jacques Giuffre

9:Smart Contracts as Execution Instead of Expression

Eric Tjong Tjin Tai

10:Smart Contracts: The Limits of Autonomous Performance

Tian Xu

11:Techno-Legal Supertoys: Smart Contracts and the Fetishization of Legal Certainty

Robert Herian

12:Languages for Smart and Computable Contracts

Christopher Clack

13:The Mathematisation of Legal Writing: The Next Contract Language?

Megan Ma

14:Beyond Human: Smart Contracts, Smart-Machines, and Documentality

David Koepsell

15:Smart Contract 'Drafting' and the Homogenisation of Languages, Siegfried Fina

Irene Ng

16:Practice Makes... Pragmatic: Designing a Practical Smart Contract Legal Architecture

Scott Farrell, Hannah Glass, Henry Wells

17:Lawyer Meets Developer: How Interdisciplinary Collaboration Builds Smarter Legal Contracts

Josh Butler, Madeleine Maslin

18:Not Up to the Job: Why Smart Contracts are Unsuitable for Employment

Gabrielle Golding, Mark Giancasparo

19:The Legal Consequences of Automated Mistake

Simon Gleeson

20:Dispute Resolution Fit for the Digital Economy: DLT an Additional Catalyst for ODR?

Charlie Morgan, Dorothy Livingston, Andrew Moir