Saturday, 27 January 2018

Smart contracts - Part 4: legal issues


By Dr. Mohammad Al-Thunibat

This post is addressing the legal issues of smart contracts & continuing the previous videos we set to address the legal issues of smart contracts & law.

3.
The enforceability of smart contracts

As declared in the previous video (Part 3), we addressed two major legal challenges facing the validity and enforceability of smart contracts in association to their formation and the nature of coding; so the legal requirements of enforceability are:
Offer and acceptance, certainty and consideration;
Relevancy of formation language & the validity of coded programs to meet this requirement

We consider the process of contracting (the wholesale adoption of the phrase) to be unhelpful, as the term ‘contract’ invites the traditional associated concepts:
Consent, Legal Capacity, Certainty & Consideration

4.
Jurisdiction & Applicable Law

To decide which jurisdiction and Law applied in case of failure or breach, one must consider three main rules:
Place of contracting,
Place of execution,
The agreed terms of jurisdiction and law applicable in case of a breach or conflict

However, where servers are decentralized and can be spread around the world & where parties can be contracting anywhere through the net, locating & pinpointing where a breach or failure occurred (and taking the appropriate cross-border action) may be complex in smart contracts.

Also, it's not clear how this system is handling these issues!! Especially where a Block doesn't allow parties to modify its content.

I hope this was useful




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