Blockchain Papers

Harshita Agarwal

No abstract is available for this record.

Michael Buchwald

No abstract is available for this record.

Junho Jeong, Yunsik Son, Yang Sun Lee

Smart contract-based development of decentralized applications is increasing with the development of blockchain technology. Although blockchainbased smart contracts are expected to revolutionize the digital economy, several security issues need to be addressed before this technology can be used reliably. The recent discovery of security weaknesses in Ethereum smart contracts questions the reliability of smart contracts. Therefore, there is a need to create and diagnose security weaknesses in Ethereum smart contracts to mitigate security risks. In this study, we assessed the potential security weaknesses of running smart contracts on Ethereum.

Елизавета Сомова, Елизавета Сомова

Статья посвящена исследованию места и особенностей такого нового института в договорном праве России, как смарт-контракт.Исследован зарубежный опыт по этой тематике

Mahdi Rashvand Boukani, Mahdi Naser

Technology development is one of the tools for developing e-commerce. In recent years, the emergence of public Ledgers such as the Blockchain and the invention of digital cryptocurrencies have created a new type of electronic contract called smart contracts. Smart contracts are contracts under the supervision of artificial intelligence in the context of the Blockchain, and the contractor replaces them with smart properties or digital cryptocurrencies. Intention is one of the pillars of the formation of any contract in legal systems. These contracts must be able to identify the element of intent in order to be considered valid in any legal system. Acquiring the intent of the parties in smart contracts through the licensing mechanisms for the use of digital signatures, the mechanisms for assigning permissions to use virtual currencies, the mechanisms for accessing information systems, and in contracts that are represented by artificial intelligence, the conclusion of a transaction by The representative represents the intention of the attorney to grant the lawyer to the client.

М. В. Мажорина

The central institute of private international law — conflict of law — in the modern globalization and information context is evolving, which is largely due to the paradigm shifts in law, laid down and developed based on international commercial arbitration. The widely interpreted concept of «rules of law» actualizes a completely new view of conflicting arrays of rules: the law of the state and the system of non-state regulators. The medieval lex mercatoria, revived in the XX century, is modernized by cyberspace, acquires a new sound in the form of e-merchant or lex informatica, especially in the context of the parallel development of smart contracts and new decentralized forms of dispute resolution, one of which is blockchain arbitration. In particular, the issues of conflict of law, traditional for cross-border transactions, arise in relation to smart contracts, which, using blockchain technology, are inherently linked to several jurisdictions. It is important to reflect on the questions of applicability of traditional conflict-of-laws bindings to the regulation of relevant relations, including through forecasting the practice of choosing the law of a state, the substantive rules of which are adapted to the use of new technologies, or recourse to the rules of non-state regulation.

Amy J. Schmitz, Colin Rule

Smart contracts built in the blockchain are quietly revolutionizing traditional transactions despite their questionable status under current law. At the same time, disputes regarding smart contracts are inevitable, and par-ties will need means for dealing with smart contract issues. This Article tackles this challenge, and proposes that parties turn to online dispute resolution (“ODR”) to efficiently and fairly resolve smart contract disputes. Furthermore, the Article acknowledges the benefits and challenges of current blockchain ODR start-ups, and proposes specific ideas for how designers could address those challenges and incorporate ODR to provide just resolutions that will not stymie efficiencies of smart contracts. Nonetheless, the Article also raises pivotal cautions and questions for ensuring the fairness and transparency of these solutions over the longer term.

Kim M. Rooney

This article discusses current developments in East Asia to more effectively use mediation with international commercial arbitration, supported by the 2019 United Nations Convention on International Settlement Agreements Resulting from Mediation (the “Singapore Convention”) and the UNCITRAL Model Law on International Commercial Mediation (the “UNCITRAL Model Mediation Law”), and by online dispute resolution using innovative technology (including artificial intelligence, machine learning, the internet of things, blockchain, distributed ledger technology and smart contracts). It discusses the background to the changing approach including the increasing pressure for arbitration to become a mechanism of last resort in international dispute resolution prompted by policy makers’ and users’ demands for cheaper , quicker and culturally more international dispute resolution and the changing sources of international investment, developments in international relations including the Belt and Road Initiative announced by China, and the initiatives being undertaken by various investment and trade communities including APEC, particularly focusing on micro, small and medium sized enterprises (each a “MSME”). This article briefly refers to the current status of online dispute resolution utilizing innovative technology, and the legal opportunities and challenges posed by it. Finally, it briefly refers to some neuroscience research relevant to dispute resolution.

Pietro Ortolani

Abstract This article investigates the twofold impact that blockchain technologies and smart contracts have on dispute resolution. On the one hand, these technologies enable private parties to devise arbitral systems that are self-enforcing and, therefore, largely bypass the recognition and enforcement procedures through which State courts traditionally exert a certain control over arbitration. This phenomenon may in the future allow arbitration to become entirely self-sufficient, thus leading to the marginalization of State courts. On the other hand, however, such a marginalization has not taken place yet; to the contrary, the recent blockchain-related phenomenon of initial coin offerings has given rise to some prominent court cases. These cases raise particularly interesting jurisdictional questions, especially in light of the difficulty of reconciling the decentralized nature of the blockchain with the territorial approach whereby jurisdiction is typically allocated among national courts.

Orna Rabinovich‐Einy, Ethan Katsh

Blockchain seems to be everywhere these days. It is touted as the new foolproof technology, which can be used for everything from cryptocurrencies, through land registries to identity cards and health records. Enthusiasts have predicted that it will bring about deep change, ensuring data security and identity authentication, while doing away with traditional intermediaries. With blockchain we are told that it is the “new internet,” an application that will change the way we transact—strengthening commitments and ensuring seamless execution. At the same time, and at an alarming frequency, we hear about mass scale fraudulent schemes attacking cryptocurrency exchanges, resulting in the loss of many millions of dollars. Aside from fraud, other problems abound, resulting from misunderstandings between transacting parties, loss of passwords and privacy risks, to name a few. The gap between the promise of an infallible, dispute-less environment and the inevitable reality of having to deal with disputes in the blockchain setting lies at the heart of this paper. It is, we contend, impossible to enjoy high levels of human interaction without generating conflict. The inevitability of disputes is enhanced in a potentially lucrative environment of innovation and complexity, such as the blockchain. In such settings, unexpected developments are bound to occur, and expectations of interacting parties are likely to differ. Indeed, this was our experience with the internet of the 1990s as the e-commerce setting began to flourish. Initially, disputes were not the focus of attention and avenues of redress were difficult to come by. Over time it became clear, that for e-commerce to evolve there needed to be trust by users, and for trust to be sustained, e-commerce platforms needed to institutionalize avenues for addressing and preventing disputes. These processes have come to be known as “online dispute resolution” (or ODR). The lessons learned from the evolution of ODR are slowly penetrating the blockchain arena, as some entities are developing ODR tools and processes that are tailored to this environment. At the same time, for ODR to be adopted and used, some of the underlying assumptions driving the design and adoption of blockchain technology need to be relaxed, as they are in tension with the tenets of dispute systems design: recognizing the inevitability of conflict, understanding trust as a human construct, and assigning weight to individual needs alongside group ideology. This article establishes its main theses in the following order. Part II provides background on the history and evolution of the blockchain, highlighting its dominant applications and its principal features. We discuss governance and trust on blockchain, finding that despite a rhetoric of disintermediation and distribution of power, there are still some players that enjoy more power than others in the blockchain setting. Furthermore, we highlight the governance choices that can shape the extent to which power is concentrated, accountability is established, and avenues of redress are available. In Part III we briefly discuss the history of ODR and describe the leading ODR schemes that have emerged for the blockchain setting, illuminating similarities and distinctions among them. Despite growing interest in ODR for blockchain, the use of these initiatives has yet to spread. We explore the various barriers that stand in the way of ODR for blockchain gaining momentum in Part IV.

Vincent Ooi, Kian Peng Soh

In the rapidly developing cyber sphere dominated by cryptocurrencies and code, it is perhaps not uncommon for firms to focus on cutting-edge technological developments leaving the law behind as an ...

Jake Goldenfein, Andrea M. Leiter

A new legal field is emerging around blockchain platforms and automated transactions. Understanding the relationships between law, legal enforcement, and these technological systems has become critical for scaling blockchain applications. Because ‘smart contracts’ do not themselves constitute agreements, the first necessary ‘legal’ development for transacting with these technologies involves linking computational transactions to natural language contracts. Various groups have accordingly begun building libraries of machine readable transaction modules that correspond to natural language contracting elements. In doing so, they are creating the building blocks for ever more complex transactions that will ultimately define the entire envelope of computational legal conduct in these environments, and likely standardise the field. However, also critical to emerging blockchain ‘legalities’, is the capacity for dispute resolution and legal enforcement. Beyond the performance of parties, or the quality of goods and services transacted, new mechanisms are also needed to address the performance of the computational transaction systems themselves. These are necessary to address the reality that smart contracts cannot be forced to perform actions beyond the parameters of their coding, even by a judicial order. Legal tools, both technological and institutional, are thus being developed to ‘soften’ the effects of self-executing transactions. In this article we treat these developments as law-making practices that are constitutive of an emerging legal field. Legal engineering exercises of this kind are not novel, and by drawing on historic examples from the common law and international arbitration, we gain insights into the competitive dynamics likely to be shaping legal engagements on the blockchain.

김제완

이더리움(Etherium)은 이른바 ‘스마트 계약(Smart Contract)’이라는 이름으로 블록체인 기술(Blockchain technology)을 이용하여 체결 뿐 아니라 이행까지도 고도로 자동화된 계약의 개념을 제시한 바 있다. 이 글은 이와 같은 스마트계약의 개념과 특징을 살펴보면서, 블록체인 기술이 계약법적으로 적용되는 경우 어떠한 법적 쟁점이 있는지에 관하여 살피고 있다.

Philippa Ryan

IntroductionStewart Macaulay’s seminal 1963 article “Non-Contractual Relations in Business” explored why merchants and manufacturers often fail to plan their commercial relationships and why they seldom resort to legal sanctions to settle disputes. Macaulay found that, in many business exchanges, detailed planning and legal sanctions play only a small role. His tentative

Jeremy Barnett, Philip Treleaven

Legal Services industries are entering a period of major disruption caused by new legal technologies (LawTech), such as artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT) and Blockchain. An area already undergoing major innovation is alternative dispute resolution (Alternative Dispute Resolution (2017) Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_dispute_resolution), especially automated online dispute resolution (Online Dispute Resolution (2017) Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_dispute_resolution; Katsh, E. and Rifkin, J. (2001) Online Dispute Resolution: Resolving Conflicts in Cyberspace. Jossey-Bass Wiley, New Jersey). In terms of LawTech, we broadly divide online dispute resolution into (a) Consumer ODR—uses technology to facilitate the resolution of disputes between ecommerce parties, typically online suppliers and consumers; (b) Judicial ODR—covers any means of settling ‘ordinary’ disputes where there is a hearing (using technology) but outside of the courtroom, such as divorce or personal injury cases; and what we refer to as (c) Corporate ODR—the use of technology to manage the resolution of any contractual disputes that may emerge from major multi-partner projects or financial transactions. This paper focuses on ODR and specifically the future use of automating anticipatory Corporate dispute resolution using AI and blockchain technologies. The paper describes the legal sector, and how it is being radically transformed by computer science.

Daniel Hellwig, Goran Karlic, Arnd Huchzermeier

This chapter looks beyond the novelty of self-executing ‘smart contracts’ in blockchain networks and explores developments against the background fact that commercial parties have, for centuries, used documentary credit to simulate autonomous performance. Blockchain-based smart contracts and documentary credit share three core functionalities which are essential to any effective autonomous performance, analogue or digital—they both (i) act through internalized media of exchange; (ii) operate as closed systems; and (iii) provide means of securing sufficient resources to guarantee contractual performance. Using these three functionalities as a framework, this chapter conducts a comparative analysis of mechanisms for effecting autonomous contractual performance in a commercial setting. From this comparison, a few hypotheses are drawn regarding the potential areas where smart contract technology is more likely to find fruitful application. In particular, the chapter considers potential limitations to applying smart contracts to scenarios beyond digital asset transfers, how dispute resolution mechanisms should be designed to complement (rather impair) the autonomous nature of contractual performance under smart contracts, and potential capital cost implications which might arise in some cases when parties seek to replace human intermediaries with smart contracts.

J. Maria Glover

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure Rule 23, and with it, the advent of the modern class action. As the fiftieth anniversary approached, many scholars, including myself, said that class actions were dead, dying, or headed for a zombie state. Many of the Supreme Court’s recent class action cases all but confirmed that view. In just the last six years, the Supreme Court ratcheted up the requirements for class certification under Rule 23 in Wal-Mart Stores v. Dukes and Comcast v. Behrend, increasing the cost and difficulty of obtaining certification. And, in a series of cases, the Court permitted the use of class action prohibitions in arbitration contracts, thus eliminating a swath of class actions and, often, the underlying claims themselves. The Court’s language in these cases also tracked stock arguments against the class action, leaving the distinct impression that the Roberts Court was on a mission to diminish or destroy the class action procedure. But a funny thing happened on the way to the funeral: just as the obituaries for the class action were being written, the Supreme Court issued a series of decisions that breathed new life into it. In Halliburton Co. v. Erica P. John Fund, Inc. (Halliburton II) and Amgen Inc. v. Connecticut Retirement Plans & Trust Funds, the Court reaffirmed the fraud-on-the-market theory, a critical tool in securities class actions. In Tyson Foods v. Bouaphakeo, the Court vindicated the use of statistical proof to satisfy Rule 23 requirements, distancing itself from strong suggestions in prior cases that individualized proof requirements would doom class certification. And the language in these cases tracked stock arguments in favor of class actions. To paraphrase Mark Twain, the rumors of the class action’s death now seem greatly exaggerated. But the Court’s class action decisions raise a new and perhaps more vexing question. If the Court is not fully intent on destroying the class action, what drives its seemingly disparate decisions? Do they reflect an anti–class action agenda losing steam, as Professor Coffee has suggested? Was the unbridled anti–class action agenda an illusion to begin with? Or is there a deeper explanation for these decisions? Part I of this Article demonstrates that the Court’s “pro–class action” decisions cannot be easily reconciled with their “anti–class action” counterparts through traditional means—neither through straightforward applications of Rule 23, nor precedent, nor particular case facts. But Part II posits that the Court’s seemingly disparate class action cases can still be rationalized. To do so, however, one must look past the procedural veneer and consider the underlying substantive rules and remedial regimes at stake. Indeed, a key question presented in each case—notwithstanding what appears in the petitions for writs of certiorari—is whether the Court will embrace an interpretation of a substantive rule that has the effect of facilitating the availability of the class action. The Court’s ultimate answer reflects a composite judgment about the substantive rule at issue and its implications for the availability of the class action device. Accordingly, to the extent one insists that procedural rules are, or ought to be, transsubstantive—that, “in form and manner of application, [they do] not vary from one substantive context to the next”—the Court’s class action jurisprudence might actually be deemed “non-transsubstantive.” This Article’s thesis has numerous implications—for separation of powers, judicial lawmaking power, federalism, the role of precedent, notions of transsubstantive procedure, procedural theory, and the nature and legitimacy of the judicial role, among others. The limitations of the Article format permit consideration in Part III of just two: First, the implications for the nature and scope of the federal courts’ procedural and substantive lawmaking powers under the Rules Enabling Act [hereinafter Enabling Act]. And second, related implications for the nature and legitimacy of the judicial role in “procedural” opinions.

Riikka Koulu

By Riikka Koulu. As cross-border online transactions increase the issue of cross-border dispute resolution and enforcement becomes more and more topical. Disputes arising from e-commerce are seldom taken into the public courts and therefore online dispute resolution (ODR) is becoming a mainstream solution for resolving them. Simultaneously, different applications and possibilities of blockchain technologies such as cryptocurrencies have caught the attention of both computer scientists and legal scholars, increasingly gaining momentum. However, the potential of blockchains reach further than their use as a currency: they can be used for the decentralised execution of programmable contracts known as smart contracts, completely without the need for intermediaries like e-commerce sites, credit card companies or courts. These possibilities have not previously been discussed in relation to dispute resolution. This article provides an introduction to this new technological possibility by examining self-executing smart contracts that utilise novel blockchain technologies. To demonstrate the logic behind smart contracts more concretely, a weather bet (i.e. a bet on what the weather is going to be in a given location) is translated into a programmable smart contract and then discussed in lines of code with further explanations. In addition to this, the author suggests that smart contracts could also be employed for the purposes of dispute resolution, which might provide a solution for the problem of enforcing ODR decisions. Instead of normative analysis, the article provides an introductory analysis of the legal implications that the blockchain technology has outside its application as virtual currency.

Pietro Ortolani

The enforcement of outcomes in online dispute resolution (ODR) is a delicate problem. Since disputes arising out of e-commerce transactions are typically low in value, the traditional channels of coercive enforcement are often not a viable option. The article argues that the Bitcoin system can be used as a source of inspiration to devise new models of self-enforcement. The article describes the legal framework of ODR and argues that the goal of self-enforcement can be attained through the use of technology. It then describes the relevant features of the Bitcoin system, underlining its potential as a new forum for the expression of private autonomy. It then investigates the features of Bitcoin adjudication, before arguing that Bitcoin must be regarded as an original and self-contained system of dispute resolution, whose characteristics can be used to theorise new models of self-enforcement. Next, it compares four alternative models of self-enforcement, two of which take Bitcoin adjudication as an example. Finally, it puts forth recommendations for all actors involved in the implementation of self-enforcing ODR mechanisms and argues that different models should be left free to compete.

Frédéric Bachand

This article concerns the ascertainment by judges of normative facts that emanate from within foreign legal orders and must be taken into consideration in the interpretation of domestic rules. The author proposes an analytical approach which is based on three ideas. First, judges must remain in control of the process aimed at ascertaining such facts. Because the interpretation of domestic rules is at stake, they cannot remain passive and rule solely on the basis of the information adduced by the parties, as they normally do while ascertaining the contents of foreign rules under a classic conflict of laws scenario. Second, foreign normative facts are often reasonably disputable, and when that is the case the parties must be afforded the opportunity to comment on whatever information the court intends to rely on while ascertaining the contents of such facts. Finally, the assistance of experts may be necessary in some cases, but full-fledged party-appointed expert testimony will rarely be a cost-effective option. Judges and parties should consider alternative options, such as the testimony of a court-appointed expert or written statements provided by party-appointed experts.