AI-enhanced smart contracts exhibit a high degree of autonomy in their ability to create and execute transactions between and among humans and machines. AI should allow a broader use of of marts contracts in consumer transactions by allowing businesses to satisfy consumer protection law through the coding of smart contracts. AI should be used to advance the principles of fairness and economic efficiency in the drafting and enforcement of smart consumer contracts.

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) introduce unique concerns related to the privacy of personal data. To create an NFT, users upload data to publicly accessible and searchable databases. This data can encompass information essential for the creation, transfer, and storage of the NFT, as well as personal details pertaining to the creator. Additionally, users might inadvertently engage with technology crafted to gather personal data. Traditional paradigms of privacy have not evolved in tandem with advancements in NFT and blockchain technology. To pinpoint where current privacy paradigms falter, this chapter delves into an introduction of NFTs, elucidating their foundational technical mechanisms and processes. Subsequently, the chapter juxtaposes current and historical privacy frameworks with NFTs, underscoring how these models may be either overly expansive or excessively restrictive for this emerging technology. This chapter suggests that Helen Nissenbaum’s concept of “contextual integrity” might offer the requisite flexibility to cater to the distinct attributes of NFTs. In conclusion, while there is a pronounced societal drive to safeguard citizen data and privacy, the overarching aim remains the enhancement of the collective good. Balancing this objective, governments should be afforded the latitude to equate society’s privacy interests with its imperative for transparency.

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) built in the blockchain are quietly revolutionizing ideas around digital assets despite their questionable status under current law. The smart contracts that control many NFTs are disrupting the way deals are done. At the same time, disputes regarding NFTs and smart contracts are inevitable and parties will need means for dealing with these highly technical issues. The chapter tackles this challenge and proposes that parties turn to online dispute resolution (ODR) to resolve NFT and smart contract disputes efficiently and fairly. Furthermore, the chapter acknowledges the benefits and challenges of current means for addressing blockchain issues and proposes ideas for how designers could address those challenges and incorporate ODR to provide efficient and fair resolutions.

This chapter considers how distributed ledger technologies and blockchain can contribute to the creation of new foundational infrastructure for financial services, including crypto-assets and smart contracts. We classify the new business models, analyse the opportunities, and highlight the regulatory challenges.

This chapter explores some of the current and future pressures on contract law that are likely to reinforce its formalist and commercialist tendencies. The first of these is the recasting of contract law as a commodity that should primarily serve the interests of commercial contractors (usually by upholding the terms of the contract) at the expense of doctrinal development. The second is the declining use of adjudication to resolve disputes, rooted in lack of support for litigation and the emphasis on non-adjudicative dispute resolution within courts themselves. The third factor is the increasing automation of contract processes, manifest in the development of ‘smart contracts’ and algorithmic contracting. These innovations are likely to require revision of the foundational understandings upon which contract law is built, notably around how contracts are created, by whom and for what purposes.

This chapter discusses the different categories of relations or connections that, in isolation or cumulatively, qualify as a means of control. This chapter adds a systematization of equity and nonequity modes of control to the existing corporate law literature. This ranges from traditional shareholding and share classes and contractual ties such as shareholder agreements and share lending contracts, to complex financial instruments, the significance of intermediated holdings, and to the role of participation on closed blockchain platforms and smart contracts governing the relationship between two or more companies. An important insight from the analysis described in this chapter is that a combined set of holdings can, due to its complex nature, lead to it running under the regulatory radar.

The main quality of a smart contract relies on the automation of contractual relationships, as the performance is triggered by an algorithm in turn triggered by the fulfilment of certain events. Most of the benefits arising from smart contracts are based on the ‘self-executing’ and ‘self-enforcing’ character, which represent a source of innovation for general contract law. Smart contracts use blockchain to ensure the transparency of the contractual relationship and to create trust in the capacity to execute the contract, which depends on the technology used. The aim of the present essay is to investigate whether and how blockchain technology platforms and smart contracts could be considered a modern form of private authority, which at least partially escapes the application of mandatory rules and traditional enforcement mechanisms. In particular, the authors will devote attention to innovative self-help mechanisms and dispute resolution systems, which can be depicted as ‘alternative’ insofar as they present themselves as independent from courts and other national state authorities.

It is difficult to come up with any events after World War II that have led our entire global society to recognise that before The Times They Are A‐Changin’1 as clearly as today’s global crisis has done. The COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath have revealed that almost everything we once considered stable and sustainable is actually built on quite shaky ground. But the crisis has also brought out the best in our coexistence, seeing that societies in many countries have shown that they are capable of finding creative solutions to overcome the current challenges. Digital technologies have played a crucial role in the world’s response to the COVID-19 crisis. Just think of modern methods of telecommunication such as video conferencing, which have made an immense contribution to maintaining the economy and work processes, or the various corona tracking apps, which try to help stopping the spread of the virus. It can be assumed that the harmful consequences of the pandemic would have grown even greater if those digital solutions had not been available. Just as almost every area of life is affected by the pandemic, so are the law itself and legal practice.

New technologies are promising a new world. It has now become apparent that blockchain technology will have many more future uses than simply supporting cryptocurrencies and other cryptoassets.1 Blockchain could support many new applications with a potentially disruptive impact on social life such as smart contracts, managing registers of assets, and the operation of autonomous agents. In addition, some governments intend to base essential government operations, such as land registries, on blockchain.2 This may potentially lead to the law being of diminishing importance in the world.3

Lex Mercatoria, Latin for ‘merchant law,’ is a very old concept that predates the rise of nation-states. During the medieval period, a body of legal conventions evolved through custom and commercial practice and was enforced by private courts along the merchant trade routes.1 Modern nation-states came to replace this traditional method of resolving disputes with domestic courts. But the gradual increase in international commerce has encouraged nations to defer to international arbitration as a solution to complex cross-border business disputes, and various other alternatives to lawsuits brought in civil courts.

The chapter provides a primer on blockchain and its affordances and discusses the implications of this novel technology for global trade and global trade regulation. It analyzes in particular how blockchain could facilitate international trade transactions and help implement the WTO agreements, and foster the digitalization of trade.

The chapter discusses also the regulatory challenges and the measures that should be taken to promote the development of a regulatory framework conducive to the development of the technology and the role that the WTO could play in this respect. The chapter argues that the WTO is uniquely positioned to play a pivotal role in allowing blockchain to be used to its full potential in the area of international trade.

One of the most plausible scenarios for how newer technologies might disrupt and reconstitute the Internet economy is based on blockchain and related mechanisms. Because of their fundamental decentralization, enforced through cryptography, these technologies hold out the promise of resisting the centralization of control by dominant digital platforms. The problem is that the power of blockchain to create trust without reliance on trusted third parties depends on immutable transactions. And that means prospectively limiting human freedom of action. Replacing human judgment with relentlessly logical machines operating self-enforcing “smart contracts” has already produced several spectacular failures. Immutability inevitably creates the possibility of catastrophe, unless paired with governance mechanisms that keep humans in the loop. The best possible approach is governance by design, incorporating layers of coordinated decision-making throughout the design of blockchain networks and applications.

Chapter 14 defines the term algorithmic contract, distinguishing it from the term smart contract, and justifying the need for the term. Then, it argues that business-to-consumer algorithmic contracts present distinct issues from business-to-business algorithmic contracts. In particular, Chapter 14 argues that privacy is the canary in the coalmine with respect to the potential threat to civil liberties presented by personalized law by way of pseudo-contract regime. Without any deliberate choice on the part of consumers or change in attitudes, contracts and practices have severely eroded consumer privacy over the past two decades. Thus, privacy terms provide an ideal case study to examine what limits on the ability of consumers to contract with businesses using algorithms to determine customized terms might look like. Personalized law, in the absence of proper fiduciary incentives or default rules, could be a major threat to the civil liberties necessary for a liberal society.