Languages for Smart and Computable Contracts
This work tackles the problem of trust in automated legal agreements for developers and legal practitioners, but it is incremental as it reviews existing issues and directions without presenting new results.
The paper addresses the challenge of ensuring that smart contract code accurately reflects legal intentions by exploring the gap between law and computer science, emphasizing the importance of language design for reliability.
Smart Contracts use computer technology to automate the performance of aspects of commercial agreements. Yet how can there be confidence that the computer code is faithful to the intentions of the parties? To understand the depth and subtlety of this question requires an exploration of natural and computer languages, of the semantics of expressions in those languages, and of the gap that exists between the disciplines of law and computer science. Here we provide a perspective on some of the key issues, explore some current research directions, and explain the importance of language design in the development of reliable Smart Contracts, including the specific methodology of Computable Contracts.