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502 Bad Gateway: Rebooting Smart Contracts

Winner of Best in Category, Justis International Law and Technology Writing Competition 2020 for the Category of Technology and the Future of Legal Practice, by Alicia Lim of the London School of Economics and Political Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2020

Alicia Lim
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Extract

Smart contracts, which were once theorised, are now somewhat realised, thanks to recent developments in distributed ledger technology. Yet, these self-executing agreements written in code are not a panacea to businesses’ and individuals’ contracting woes. It is argued that smart contracts worsen existing power asymmetries between contracting parties, thus, fallbacks must be provided for.

Type
Shorter Articles
Information
Legal Information Management , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , June 2020 , pp. 106 - 107
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2020. Published by British and Irish Association of Law Librarians

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References

Footnotes

1 Nick Szabo, ‘Smart Contracts: Building Blocks for Digital Markets’ (1994) <http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/rob/Courses/InformationInSpeech/CDROM/Literature/LOTwinterschool2006/szabo.best.vwh.net/smart.contracts.html> accessed 4 August 2019.

2 Kevin Werbach and Nicholas Cornell, ‘Contracts Ex Machina’ (2017) 67 Duke LJ 313.

3 Helen Eenmaa-Dimitrieva and Maria José Schmidt-Kessen, ‘Creating Markets in No-trust Environments: the Law and Economics of Smart Contracts’ [2019] 35 C.L.S. Rev. 69-88.

4 Werbach, Kevin and Cornell, Nicholas, ‘Contracts Ex Machina’ (2017) 67 Duke LJ 313Google Scholar.

5 Werbach, Kevin and Cornell, Nicholas, ‘Contracts Ex Machina’ (2017) 67 Duke LJ 313Google Scholar.

6 AXA, ‘AXA goes blockchain with fizzy’ (AXA, 13 September 2017) <https://www.axa.com/en/newsroom/news/axa-goes-blockchain-with-fizzy> accessed 4 August 2019.

7 Surden, Harry, ‘Computable Contracts’ (2012) 46 UC Davis Law Rev 629Google Scholar.

8 Werbach, Kevin and Cornell, Nicholas, ‘Contracts Ex Machina’ (2017) 67 Duke L.J. 313Google Scholar.

9 Surden, Harry, ‘Computable Contracts’ (2012) 46 UC Davis Law Rev. 629Google Scholar.

10 Kevin Low and Eliza Mik, ‘Pause the Blockchain Legal Revolution’ (2019) Forthcoming, International & Comparative Law Quarterly. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3439918 p 29.

11 Kevin Low and Eliza Mik, ‘Pause the Blockchain Legal Revolution’ (2019) Forthcoming, International & Comparative Law Quarterly. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3439918 p 30.

12 Tatiana Cutts, ‘Smart Contracts and the Average Joe’ (2019) Forthcoming, W Va L Rev.

13 Peter Brogden, ‘Smart Contracts and Web 3.0: the Evolution of Law?’ (3 May 2017). Computers and Law, June 2017.

14 Tatiana Cutts, ‘Smart Contracts and the Average Joe’ (2019) forthcoming, W Va L Rev.

15 Stewart Macaulay, ‘An Empirical View of Contract’ (1985) Wis L Rev 465-482.

16 Mik, Eliza, ‘Smart contracts: terminology, technical limitations and real world complexity’ (2017) 9(2) LIT 269Google Scholar.

17 Karen Levy, ‘Book-Smart, Not Street-Smart: Blockchain-Based Smart Contracts and The Social Workings of Law’ (2017) Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 1-15.

18 European Commission, ‘Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI’ (2019).