Can I read Techno-Legal Supertoys: Smart Contracts and the Fetishization of Legal Certainty on EtoBox?

Techno-Legal Supertoys: Smart Contracts and the Fetishization of Legal Certainty by Robert Herian is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is Techno-Legal Supertoys: Smart Contracts and the Fetishization of Legal Certainty about?

This chapter explores the interparty electronic agreements known as ‘smart contracts’ against the established boundaries of contract law and theory. Underpinning the question of characterization are three overlapping legal and extra-legal factors. The first concerns legitimacy, in law and fact, of smart contract agreements. Second are uncertainties regarding applicable remedies at law and in equity. And third, fetishization of the perfectibility and legal certainty of smart contracts by technologists and other stakeholders that risks undermining and impoverishing contracts as socio-legal institutions and processes. Set against the backdrop of a fetishistic techno-legal imaginary in which smart contracts echo science-fiction writer Brian Aldiss’ conception of ‘supertoys’, this chapter argues that legal legitimacy and certainty of smart contracts rests on fundamental principles of contract law and theory, not on quasi-legal conditions determined by the limits of coding and design. Rooted in centuries of contract law and theory are expectations of right and wrong, including a need to incorporate remedies demanded for the intellectual, social, and procedural life of contracts and contr

Author

Robert Herian

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published

2022

Language

EN