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5 Italian L.J. 493 (2019)
The Enforceability of Smart Contracts

handle is hein.journals/italj5 and id is 498 raw text is: The Enforceability of Smart Contracts Mateja Durovic* and Franciszek Lech** Abstract The development of new technologies has different effects on the existing law. Smart contracts are one of the forms of the new technologies that questions the application of the traditional contract law on commercial transactions using smart contracts. Italy was among the first jurisdictions to recognize full legal validity and enforceability of smart contracts. However, this issue is still being discussed in the United Kingdom. In that context, the enforceability of contractual transactions concluded in the form of smart contracts represents one of the major legal questions. Moreover, the question is whether the existing English contract law needs to be modified in order to secure the enforceability of smart contracts. These issues will be accordingly examined in this paper with the aim to understand better the relationship of the traditional contract law, on the one side, and, smart contracts, on the other side. I. Introduction' In the recent years, businesses have started increasingly applying smart contracts for a number of diverse commercial transactions. In that context, the principal legal question is whether commercial transaction concluded through the smart contracts will be enforceable before the court. The main legal issue herein is to understand the relationship between the smart contracts, on the one side, and traditional contract law, on the other side. Therefore, the main objective of this paper is to contribute to the explanation of that relationship in order to understand whether smart contracts are, from the perspective of the traditional contract law, enforceable. This topic has recently attracted a lot of attention in the United Kingdom and this paper will focus on the enforceability of smart contracts under the English law. In that sense, it will be useful to see how common law, as traditionally more business focused and commercial friendly system of rules, respond to the application of the new technologies in commercial transactions. * Reader in Contract and Commercial Law, King's College London. ** Penultimate Year Student, Law LLB and Dickson Poon Scholar for Excellence in Studies, King's College London. 1 This paper was presented at the Kopaonik School of Natural Law. We would like to thank the participants for their comments and suggestions.

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