Conflicts of Laws and Codes

Blockchain technology promises to perform tasks that have traditionally been assigned to the law and the realm of legal institutions. Smart contracts create agreements that are both automatable by computers and enforceable via the tamper-proof execution of computer codes. Based on such smart contracts, some providers of blockchain technologies offer ‘to act as a digital jurisdiction’. The promise seems to be that law of the relevant jurisdiction is entirely substituted by the rules codified in the blockchain. However, even if it has often been argued that the ‘Code Is Law’, the law is not—and arguably never will be—entirely redundant. Therefore, the challenge is to identify the boundaries of such digital jurisdictions by clarifying the relationship between law and code and to develop new principles for conflicts of laws or rather principles for the conflict of laws and codes.