Smart Legal Contracts

Abstract

This book provides a landmark survey of computational contracting: one of the most important legal and practical trends for centuries. Computational contracts introduce software functionalities to operationalize, rather than merely record, acts of commercial coordination. In doing so, they bring together software and law in interesting and unchartered ways to create dynamic documents that present unique opportunities and challenges. Distributed ledger technologies have propelled ‘smart contracts’ into mainstream application over the last decade. The introduction of software into contractual relationships, however, may be implemented in a number of ways, of which such ‘smart contracts’ are only one. Broadly, it is possible both to express legal promises in code and to incorporate code-based elements within conventional (‘paper’) contracts. This volume examines the observed approaches and reflects critically on their relationship and the common issues raised. The organizing principle behind the volume is that emerging design patterns and considerations are beginning to form around the instantiation of code in contractual agreements—the ‘smart legal contract’. With incisive analyses from legal scholars, computer scientists, judges, and legal practitioners across common law jurisdictions, this volume addresses many of the foundational questions raised by smart contracts in legal theory and practice and provides a critical point of orientation in an emerging but still disparate literature.