The article considers current legal issues of implementation and use of smart contracts in the sphere of capital construction. It is shown that an objective need of capital participants to conduct electronic transactions, store and process legally significant information, and conclude smart contracts has been formed. The rapid development of high technologies has inevitably led to the need to use smart contracts in the sphere of capital construction as a mechanism for quick transactions. A smart contract is a legal form of obligatory relations in the sphere of capital construction, a special means of forming and expressing the will of participants aimed at creating the desired legal consequences. The use of smart contracts will allow developing and simplifying the interaction of participants in the construction process itself, increasing their level of trust, and accelerating mandatory procedures.
The introduction of digital technologies into many economic processes is changing the functioning principles of many government institutions. This process requires regulatory regulation of newly emerged economic relations and their proper registration and legal protection. The issues of developing information relations in the sphere of turnover of the Central Federal District are related to economic, political, social and other factors that are taken into account in strategic planning, including the national security of the Russian Federation. As part of the study, a comparison of the legal regimes of the CFD turnover using the DLT system was carried out, the legal regimes of digital currency circulation and cryptocurrency circulation as a type of CFD in developed countries were analyzed.
Relationships involving blockchain organizations are largely governed by special rules that form the lex cryptographia. This regulatory framework is represented by the code of smart contracts and blockchain protocols. Regulating the legal status of digital legal entities, it acts as a local legal act, and in the field of private international law, as a supranational, conditionally autonomous legal or sub-legal system. In the first case, the lex cryptographia can be classified as a “third” legal order, developing alongside the international and domestic legal systems. In the second case, it is a system of rules that operates solely within the applicable legal order, based on the principles of autonomy of the parties’ will and freedom of contract.
Although smart contracts are currently realized in a limited scope around virtual assets, the blockchain characteristics of transparency, immutability, and self-enforcing capabilities hold significant value—especially in real estate transactions—as a way to overcome the limitations of traditional real estate transaction systems, such as double selling and duplicate registration, while improving efficiency. For these reasons, several countries have implemented blockchain technology in their real estate registration or recording systems as well as in smart contracts, and are actively operating them. We also need to identify the pros and cons of these operations and utilize blockchain-based smart contracts for real estate transactions. Under current domestic law, introducing measures to digitize real estate transactions using blockchain technology presents several legal challenges. Key issues include how to address the legal validity of smart contracts, the valuation of tokens, compliance with requirements for the transfer of property rights, the legal effect of public registration, and potential conflicts with data privacy obligations. Therefore, measures to promote smart contracts must be established through a thorough review of their consistency with existing legal frameworks. First, to prepare for the activation of smart contracts, measures to ensure regulatory flexibility—such as standard trading rules that minimize post-contract modifications—must be established, along with efforts toward technical standardization. Furthermore, if smart contracts are introduced, attempting to transition the real estate registration system to a blockchain based on its core purpose is the ultimate way to resolve the issues of the existing registration system. Legislative discussion requires establishing legal grounds to grant in rem effect to the digitization and embodiment of real assets, as well as drafting a new registration system to recognize blockchain-based registration records as valid registration for the creation and transfer of real rights. Additionally, relevant legal frameworks must be revised to ensure that the operation of blockchain does not conflict with personal information protection obligations. As blockchain technology—a core domain of information and communication technology, alongside AI—expands beyond the socio-economic sphere into daily life, a more advanced discussion is needed regarding the distinct functions or roles smart contracts based on it will play at this current stage.
Electoral conflicts continue to pose a danger to the consolidation of democracy in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region. Efforts to resolve conflicts is often criticised as the use of conventional dispute resolution procedures are proving to be cumbersome, expensive, opaque and logistically challenging, all of which erode public confidence in election results. The study seeks to design and validate an integrated e-technology framework that enhances the speed, accessibility and credibility of electoral dispute resolution in SADC by aligning legal reforms with digital tools for filing, evidence management and adjudication. Six SADC member states were purposively selected: Zimbabwe, Malawi, Namibia, South Africa, Mozambique and Mauritius. Selection was based on, firstly, electoral dispute history: all six have experienced post-election litigation 2018-2025, ensuring relevance; secondly, digital variance: South Africa and Mauritius represent high digital readiness per ITU ICT Development Index 2024, while Malawi and Mozambique represent low infrastructure contexts, strengthening transferability; and finally legal diversity in all six. This study used primary data collected through 150 structured surveys of IT experts and officials across the six countries, 75 key informant interviews (KIIs) with judges and national elections commissions (NECs)/electoral management bodies (EMBs) legal officers. Secondary data included electoral court judgments 2018-2025, observer reports, SADC Principles and Guidelines Governing Democratic Elections 2021 and national electoral acts to map legal gaps. The results also show that an integrated e-technology framework can minimise the cost of pursuing electoral justice by 42% on average, improve access for rural litigants by enabling mobile filing, promote transparency through real-time case tracking and reduce median case resolution time from 112 days to 38 days in pilot simulations. The proposed framework integrates four interlocking components, namely blockchain[1]based evidence preservation, e-filing and case management portals, virtual hearings, online mediation platforms, and open data dashboards. The study concludes that while digitalising electoral fairness in SADC is both essential and feasible, institutional and political shortcomings cannot be addressed by technology alone.
The digital transformation of criminal justice systems is reshaping investigations, prosecutions and court proceedings by changing how evidence is generated, preserved, verified and evaluated. This structured review examines the admissibility of digital evidence and the prospects for integrating blockchain technologies into law enforcement practice through a methodologically transparent synthesis of legal, forensic, governance, and computer-science literature. The analysis covers electronic case management, digital evidence lifecycle controls, blockchain-enabled chain-of-custody systems, smart-contract-assisted workflows, privacy-preserving architectures and cross-border evidentiary recognition. The review develops a blockchain-enabled evidentiary governance framework that links digital evidence generation, chain-of-custody management, blockchain verification, legal admissibility, and judicial trust outcomes. It also distinguishes established findings, such as the operational value of electronic case management and cryptographic verification, from emerging pilot evidence and future hypotheses concerning automated enforcement, cross-jurisdictional ledgers and autonomous justice systems. The synthesis shows that blockchain can strengthen evidentiary integrity when deployed as a governed verification layer combining permissioned architecture, off-chain evidence storage, on-chain metadata, validated consensus rules and auditable institutional oversight. However, its implementation remains constrained by governance failures, smart contract vulnerabilities, oracle and data-quality risks, scalability limits, privacy conflicts, legal uncertainty, institutional resistance and cost-benefit trade-offs. The review concludes that criminal justice digitalisation requires socio-technical governance rather than technological substitution, with legal reform, professional capacity, interoperability standards and rights-preserving design forming the foundation for trustworthy digital proceedings.
In the context of information technology deeply embedded in social interactions and transactional activities, online chat records have become a representative and frequently used type of electronic evidence in civil litigation. However, such evidence relies on specific technical environments and is easily edited and tampered with, leading to long-standing issues of scattered standards and unclear paths in judicial practice regarding evidence collection, examination, and evaluation of probative value. The current system still shows deficiencies in notarization preservation, judicial authentication, platform assistance obligations, and technical assistance identification, making it difficult to match the highly technological development trend of electronic evidence. Accordingly, it is possible to achieve a structural reshaping of authenticity identification rules by optimizing notarization and authentication mechanisms, clarifying the scope of assistance and procedural obligations of chat software operators, and introducing trusted technical means such as blockchain.
The article examines the concept of legal settlement finality as applied to two fundamentally different payment instruments — decentralized cryptocurrencies and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). The author analyzes the absence of a statutory definition of settlement finality in Russian financial law, compares the approaches of Russia, China, India and the UAE, and studies judicial practice and doctrine. Based on a comparative legal analysis, an original definition of the legal finality of digital settlement is proposed, and liability regimes for payment process participants prior to transaction completion are differentiated in relation to cryptocurrency P2P transactions and CBDC operations.
The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain technologies has fundamentally transformed the normative foundations, authority structures, and legitimacy of contemporary legal systems. While these technologies are commonly portrayed as instruments for enhancing efficiency and legal certainty, their increasing integration into legal decision-making raises profound philosophical questions concerning the nature of law, justice, and human agency. This article critically examines how AI and blockchain reshape legal normativity through the lens of legal philosophy. Employing a normative juridical methodology supported by conceptual and philosophical approaches, the study analyzes the implications of algorithmic decision-making and decentralized technological infrastructures for the evolution of legal authority. The findings demonstrate a paradigmatic shift from human-centered normative reasoning toward computational rationality grounded in algorithmic logic. AI replaces interpretative legal reasoning with probabilistic prediction, privileging statistical inference over moral deliberation. Simultaneously, blockchain institutionalizes automated legal enforcement through smart contracts, thereby minimizing interpretative discretion and limiting the contextual flexibility traditionally required to achieve substantive justice. These developments contribute to the emergence of what this article conceptualizes as post-human legal normativity, in which legal authority increasingly resides within technological systems rather than human reasoning and institutional judgment. The study argues that this transformation generates significant challenges to justice, transparency, accountability, and democratic legitimacy. The growing reliance on algorithmic authority risks reducing law to a technical mechanism detached from its ethical and normative foundations. Consequently, the philosophy of law must be reconstructed to reaffirm the centrality of human agency in legal governance and to ensure that emerging technologies function as instruments serving legal values rather than autonomous sources of legal authority.