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Smart Contracts And The Illusion Of Automated Enforcement, Danielle D'Onfro
Smart Contracts And The Illusion Of Automated Enforcement, Danielle D'Onfro
Scholarship@WashULaw
This symposium essay explores the barriers to deploying smart contracts in the consumer finance space: the humans themselves, existing consumer protection laws, and the other businesses who have financial contracts with consumers but that cannot deploy smart contracts. These three barriers render perfectly automated enforcement all but impossible. Nevertheless, there may be room for modifiable smart contracts in the consumer financial space although these contracts may be only marginally more efficient than traditional contracts.
Contractual Arbitrage, Stephen J. Choi, G. Mitu Gulati, Robert E. Scott
Contractual Arbitrage, Stephen J. Choi, G. Mitu Gulati, Robert E. Scott
Faculty Scholarship
Standard-form contracts are likely to be incomplete because they are not tailored to the needs of particular deals. In an attempt to reduce incompleteness, standard-form contracts often contain clauses with vague or ambiguous terms. Terms with indeterminate meaning present opportunities for strategic behavior well after a contract has been executed. This linguistic uncertainty in standard-form commercial contracts creates an opportunity for “contractual arbitrage”: parties may argue ex post that the uncertainties in expression mean something that the contracting parties did not contemplate ex ante. This chapter argues that the scope for contractual arbitrage is a direct function of the techniques …
Justifying Bad Deals, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan
Justifying Bad Deals, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan
All Faculty Scholarship
In the past decade, psychological and behavioral studies have found that individual commitment to contracts persists beyond personal relationships and traditional promises. Even take-it-or-leave it consumer contracts get substantial deference from consumers — even when the terms are unenforceable, even when the assent is procedurally compromised, and even when the drafter is an impersonal commercial actor. Indeed, there is mounting evidence that people import the morality of promise into situations that might otherwise be described as predatory, exploitative, or coercive. The purpose of this Article is to propose a framework for understanding what seems to be widespread acceptance of regulation …