Smart Contracts as Legal Innovation: Old Wine in New Bottles? | 20th Anniversary of the Summer School in Law, Business and Economic Policy

Innovations such as cryptoassets, decentralized finance, non-fungible tokens, decentralized autonomous organizat ions or the metaverse have in common a degree of reliance on “smart contracts” – agreements embodied in computer code that are self-executing in important respects. The talk will consider smart contracts as examples of the role of legal innovation in economic history, and will illustrate how these arrangements address problems long handled through other means: how to embed an agreement in such a way as to protect against ex post alteration; how to provide for reliable and consistent enforcement; how to deal with the problem of abusive, incompetent, or self-interested government; how to achieve clarity of interpretation and reduce the risk of disputes over meaning; and how to provide for fair, rapid and efficient resolution of disputes.

Prof. Geoffrey Miller is a leading scholar in the area of Law and Economics and its application to banking, finance and insurance at the School of Law of New York University (NYU) and author of a dozen books and more than 200 research papers. He teaches the Bachelor course “Fundamentals of Law and Economics” from July 11 to July 21 as part of the Summer School program 2022. Prof. Aleksander Berentsen and Prof. Fabian Schär are experts in the area of Blockchain, Cryptoassets, Decentralized Finance and Monetary Policy at the Faculty of Business and Economics of the University of Basel and authors of the very successful book on Bitcoin, Blockchain, and Cryptoassets published by MIT Press in 2020.

Program

Please register here (The registration window is open until July 6, 2022).

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