A new legal field is emerging around blockchain platforms and automated transactions. Understanding the relationships between law, legal enforcement, and these technological systems has become critical for scaling blockchain applications. Because ‘smart contracts’ do not themselves constitute agreements, the first necessary ‘legal’ development for transacting with these technologies involves linking computational transactions to natural language contracts. Various groups have accordingly begun building libraries of machine readable transaction modules that correspond to natural language contracting elements. In doing so, they are creating the building blocks for ever more complex transactions that will ultimately define the entire envelope of computational legal conduct in these environments, and likely standardise the field. However, also critical to emerging blockchain ‘legalities’, is the capacity for dispute resolution and legal enforcement. Beyond the performance of parties, or the quality of goods and services transacted, new mechanisms are also needed to address the performance of the computational transaction systems themselves. Such mechanisms are necessary to address the reality that smart contracts cannot be forced to perform actions beyond the parameters of their coding, even by a judicial order. Legal tools, both technological and institutional, are thus being developed to ‘soften’ the effects of self-executing transactions. In this article we treat these developments as law-making practices that are constitutive of an emerging legal field. Legal engineering exercises of this kind are not novel, and by drawing on historic examples from the common law and international arbitration, we gain insights into the competitive dynamics likely to be shaping legal engagements on the blockchain.

中文翻译：

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区块链上的法律工程：作为法律行为的“智能合约”

一个新的法律领域正在围绕区块链平台和自动交易出现。了解法律、执法和这些技术系统之间的关系对于扩展区块链应用程序变得至关重要。由于“智能合约”本身并不构成协议，因此使用这些技术进行交易的第一个必要“法律”发展涉及将计算交易与自然语言合约联系起来。因此，各个团体已经开始构建与自然语言签约元素相对应的机器可读交易模块库。在这样做的过程中，他们正在为更复杂的交易创建构建块，最终定义这些环境中计算法律行为的整个范围，并可能使该领域标准化。然而，对于新兴的区块链“合法性”也至关重要的是争议解决和执法的能力。除了各方的表现或交易的商品和服务的质量之外，还需要新的机制来解决计算交易系统本身的表现。这种机制对于解决这样一个现实是必要的，即智能合约不能被强制执行超出其编码参数的行为，即使是通过司法命令。因此，正在开发技术和制度方面的法律工具以“软化”自动执行交易的影响。在本文中，我们将这些发展视为构成新兴法律领域的立法实践。这种法律工程练习并不新鲜，