a. Law as the pillar for smart contracts a) Legislative clarifications to address controversies and new legal issues The first step is to validate the legal status of smart contracts. The law should clarify that it is legal to apply smart contracts to automate certain types of legal contracts and certain parts of legal contracts. Just like electronic documents are legalized and justified as legal evidence in the judicial operation, smart contracts should be clarified and legalized as legal means in the contract enforcement. The legalization can head off legal challenges to the validity of applying smart contracts in a legal contract in the first place. The law should also clarify controversial topics to pave the way for the widespread adoption of smart contracts. The way to achieve this goal is to have smart contracts run parallel with traditional contracts—smart contracts are responsible for contract enforcement technically without any legal implications, and all related legal issues should be directed to contract law rules. In other words, whenever parties sign a contract, they can choose to utilize or not to utilize smart contracts to fully or partially enforce contractual obligations. If they do choose to utilize smart contracts as the tool to execute the performance, contract law rules and theories run behind the smart contracts to …show more content…
People cannot argue that they have no legal capacity when triggering the smart contract; they cannot recognize the meaning of the code, so no meeting of the minds occurs; and codes cannot be deemed as a “writing” to meet the requirement of statute of fraud, thus rendering the contract unenforceable because all these legal issues would be solved through contract law rules and theories. Smart contracts are just a tool in enforcing the legal contracts without other legal