Law Commons^™

Governing The Interface Between Natural And Formal Language In Smart Contracts, Joshua A.T. Fairfield, Niloufer Selvadurai

Scholarly Articles

Much of the confusion about the proper regulation of smart contracts stems from the fact that both code and law are expressed in language. Natural (human) and formal (computer) languages are profoundly different, however. Natural language in the form of a true legal contract expresses human meaning and expectation. Code simply acts, and when code acts contrary to the understanding of the parties to a contract, courts must have a theoretical and legal basis in order to intervene--which this Article provides.

Present scholarship on the governance of smart contracts centers on logistical problems relating to the effects of automation on …

“You Keep Using That Word”: Why Privacy Doesn’T Mean What Lawyers Think, Joshua A.T. Fairfield

Scholarly Articles

This article explores how the need to define privacy has impeded our ability to protect it in law.

The meaning of “privacy” is notoriously hard to pin down. This article contends that the problem is not with the word “privacy,” but with the act of trying to pin it down. The problem lies with the act of definition itself and is particularly acute when the words in question have deep-seated and longstanding common-language meanings, such as liberty, freedom, dignity, and certainly privacy. If one wishes to determine what words like these actually mean to people, definition is the wrong tool …

John Stuart Mill’S Harm Principle And Free Speech: Expanding The Notion Of Harm, Melina Constantine Bell

Scholarly Articles

This article advocates employing John Stuart Mill’s harm principle to set the boundary for unregulated free speech, and his Greatest Happiness Principle to regulate speech outside that boundary because it threatens unconsented-to harm. Supplementing the harm principle with an offense principle is unnecessary and undesirable if our conception of harm integrates recent empirical evidence unavailable to Mill. For example, current research uncovers the tangible harms individuals suffer directly from bigoted speech, as well as the indirect harms generated by the systemic oppression and epistemic injustice that bigoted speech constructs and reinforces. Using Mill’s ethical framework with an updated notion of …

A Need For The Use Of Nonsexist Language In The Courts, William B. Hill, Jr.

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.