Full Description
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.
Contents
1: Jason Grant Allen: Wrapped and Stacked: 'Smart Contracts' and the Interaction of Natural and Formal Language
2: Sir Geoffrey Vos MR: End-to-End Smart Legal Contracts: Moving from Aspiration to Reality
3: Justice Aedit Abdullah, Yihan Goh: Making Smart Contracts a Reality: Confronting Definitions, Enforceability, and Regulation
4: Justice Stephen Estcourt AM: Smart Contracts and Dispute Resolution: Faster Horses or a New Car
5: Ian Grigg: Why the Ricardian Contract Came About: A Retrospective Dialogue with Lawyers
6: Alfonso Delgado Rius: Smart Contracts: Taxonomy, Transaction Costs, and Design Trade-offs
7: Natasha Blycha, Ariane Garside: Smart Legal Contracts: A Model for the Integration of Machine Capabilities and Contracts
8: Susannah Wilkinson, Jacques Giuffre: Six Levels of Contract Automation: Further Analysis of the Evolution to Smart Legal Contracts
9: Eric Tjong Tjin Tai: Smart Contracts as Execution Instead of Expression
10: Tian Xu: Smart Contracts: The Limits of Autonomous Performance
11: Robert Herian: Techno-Legal Supertoys: Smart Contracts and the Fetishization of Legal Certainty
12: Christopher Clack: Languages for Smart and Computable Contracts
13: Megan Ma: The Mathematisation of Legal Writing: The Next Contract Language?
14: David Koepsell: Beyond Human: Smart Contracts, Smart-Machines, and Documentality
15: Siegfried Fina, Irene Ng: Smart Contract 'Drafting' and the Homogenisation of Languages
16: Scott Farrell, Hannah Glass, Henry Wells: Practice Makes... Pragmatic: Designing a Practical Smart Contract Legal Architecture
17: Josh Butler, Madeleine Maslin: Lawyer Meets Developer: How Interdisciplinary Collaboration Builds Smarter Legal Contracts
18: Gabrielle Golding, Mark Giancasparo: Not Up to the Job: Why Smart Contracts are Unsuitable for Employment
19: Simon Gleeson: The Legal Consequences of Automated Mistake
20: Charlie Morgan, Dorothy Livingston, Andrew Moir: Dispute Resolution Fit for the Digital Economy: DLT an Additional Catalyst for ODR?
