Abstract/Summary

In law, the term ‘smart contract’ has been used loosely with no one definition winning out. In an attempt to ameliorate this, the Law Commission of England and Wales has endeavoured to add the word ‘legal’ to ‘smart contract’. No relief is found in the computer coding world, where ‘smart contract' is used to indicate not a single but several forms of computer codes that do not involve (necessarily) two parties. Through a sample smart contract use case, this paper identifies more than six such coding concepts and constructs which have been corroborated by the results of trend data analysis. Turning to the public, statistics gathered show a very limited understanding of the terms ‘smart contract’ and ‘smart legal contract’ (and their implications). From these findings, this paper recognises the inappropriateness of the use of the single term ‘smart contract’ for the many diverse iterations as used by computer scientists; and the unsuitability of the word ‘contract’ as part of the term ‘smart contract’ by computer scientists because of the term’s legal import. The redundancy of the term ‘smart legal contract’ is established, and in conclusion a definition of ‘smart contract’ which only considers universal, future-proof characteristics is proposed. In this we disagree with the definitions offered by the Law Commission. The definition we have proffered actively contemplates the legacy use of the term in both law and technology, and is broad enough to be sector- and future-adaptable, and technology-agnostic.