Law Is Code: Blockchain as a regulatory technology
Samer Hassan, Associate Professor at Berkman Center at Harvard Univ. & Univ. Complutense de Madrid
Hoy traemos a este espacio esta slideshare titulada “Law Is Code: Blockchain as a regulatory technology” de Samer Hassan, Associate Professor at Berkman Center at Harvard Univ. & Univ. Complutense de Madrid. Presented at Harvard’s Data Privacy Lab, within the Institute for Quantitative Social Science’s weekly seminar series.
“Code is law” refers to the idea that, with the advent of digital technology, code has progressively established itself as the predominant way to regulate the behavior of Internet users. Yet, while computer code can enforce rules more efficiently than legal code, it also comes with a series of limitations, mostly because it is difficult to transpose the ambiguity and flexibility of legal rules into a formalized language which can be interpreted by a machine. The Blockchain, the decentralized technology behind Bitcoin, is getting plenty of attention as a new paradigm with multiple implications. In fact, with the blockchain-based “smart contracts”, code is assuming an even stronger role in regulating people’s interactions over the Internet, as many contractual transactions get transposed into smart contract code. In this talk, I will discuss the shift from the traditional notion of “code is law” (i.e., code having the effect of law) to the new conception of “law is code” (i.e., law being defined as code).
