Smart contracts from the contract law perspective: outlining new regulative strategies

Assistant at civil law department of Yaroslav Mudryi National Law University Ukraine, Kharkiv, Pushkinska 77, E-mail: filatovaukraine@gmail.com.

Search for other works by this author on:

International Journal of Law and Information Technology, Volume 28, Issue 3, Autumn 2020, Pages 217–242, https://doi.org/10.1093/ijlit/eaaa015

25 August 2020

Cite

Nataliia Filatova, Smart contracts from the contract law perspective: outlining new regulative strategies, International Journal of Law and Information Technology, Volume 28, Issue 3, Autumn 2020, Pages 217–242, https://doi.org/10.1093/ijlit/eaaa015

Navbar Search Filter Mobile Enter search term Search Navbar Search Filter Enter search term Search

Abstract

Smart contracts nowadays start being widely used in various areas of economic and social life. In most cases smart contracts are somehow related to legal contracts: the former may constitute part of a legal contract, an entire contract, or be used to automate a contract performance. Meanwhile, a question whether modern contract law is applicable to smart contracts is rather debatable, since smart contracts initially were designed to rely only on technical rules embedded in blockchain and considered as self-sufficient instruments capable of addressing various issues which may emerge in practice. However, practice has shown that technical regulation does not often cope with the problems one may face when using smart contracts, which confirms the need for legal regulation. Although smart contracts have many technical peculiarities, they do not make application of contract law provisions totally impossible. Thus, what the modern contract law needs is a set of special rules applicable to the practice of smart contracting.