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Blockchain e Smart Contract: A Manual for Professionals and Universities by Jur CLO Raffaele Battaglini and Lawyer Marco Tullio Giordano

The volume “Blockchain e Smart Contract” has been drafted as a reference for lawyers, entrepreneurs, and technicians in Italy willing to learn more about blockchain and smart contracts.

Jur
Jur.io
7 min readMar 5, 2020

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Legaltech Looks Like an Unstoppable Wave

As a matter of fact, DLTs (Distributed Ledger Technology) have gathered more and more interest in market operators, in the public administration and in the general public. And this has led legislators and regulators in various countries to discuss, draft and release the first dedicated laws.

Blockchain and Smart Contract, by Raffaele Battaglini and Marco Tullio Giordano

However, the Italian market was sorely lacking a book providing adequate in-depth analysis on the technical features of both blockchain and smart contracts that included their legal implications. And it is our belief that it is essential to have prior knowledge and a complete understanding of the technology for proper management of the legal issues that arise from its adoption.

Therefore, we — Raffaele Battaglini and Marco Tullio Giordano as editors of the book — along with the publisher Giuffrè Francis Lefebvre decided to embark on the journey that eventually led to the publications of the volume “Blockchain e Smart Contract”.

We further believe that the future of the legal profession is to merge with informatics and the rise of “code lawyers” is necessary to this coalescence.

Main Features of the Book

The book is designed for both lawyers and non-lawyers. To this end, the book sees the involvement of experts from different sectors: entrepreneurs, software developers, lawyers, academics. All of them with significant expertise in blockchain and cryptocurrency.

In particular, the book is divided into four sections:

  • Part 1: is about the technical and legal aspects of blockchain technology moving from the origin, philosophy and typologies of DLTs up to liability, intellectual property, GDPR, eIDAS Regulation, Italian and international laws as well as public and private economic topics;
  • Part 2: deals with smart contracts including definition and relationship with legal contracts, applicable laws and jurisdiction, Italian and international laws, plus the legal aspects of decentralised autonomous organisations;
  • Part 3: in this section, actual applications of blockchain and smart contracts are described in several fields such as corporate governance, dispute resolution, smart properties, intellectual property, supply chain, public services, financial market;
  • Appendix: this Appendix comprises smart contracts (i.e. token issuance and insurances) explained by a software developer.

The Ideation of the Opera

After receiving the green light from the publisher, firstly we defined the structure of the book as well as every single topic and chapter as explained above: we wanted to give the lawyers and technologists a flow of knowledge not available on the market.

Check it out: Raffaele on the Smart Contract Technology

Then, we discussed about other possible authors who could help to explain every single topic in detail. Eventually, we came up with a list of names that we strongly believe possessed outstanding knowledge on the field from a technical and legal standpoint.

Marco Tullio at Talent Garden discussing about opportunities on the blockchain

If you want to know more about the “legaltech dream team” that supported us, read on until the end!

Get the Content of the Book in a Nutshell

As mentioned, the book is the work of several authors providing useful insights to a multifaceted and largely misunderstood disruptive technology.

The following is a selection of the main themes:

  1. The most peculiar features of the blockchain are uncontrollability and autonomy which make it practically unstoppable;
  2. The blockchain was born to revolutionize the way in which people, organizations and, perhaps one day, even countries exchange “value”; its characteristics are outlining new and unimaginable potential that goes far beyond the “simple” economy;
  3. The features enabled by the Internet of Value often allow finding solutions to real business problems that would not have been possible using traditional technologies;
  4. Decentralisation, i.e. the attribution of the same rights and level of information to each device connected to the network, is a declaration that is political, economic and informatical at the same time, which aims at the freedom and independence of the points in the chain and excludes a central authority with an administrative role;
  5. The use of blockchain technology to verify the transfer of cryptocurrency, to confirm the transfer of ownership, to verify a subscription, to ascertain the origin and/or authenticity of a food product or a work of art, to confirm the validity of a vote, can be summarized in a basic concept: transfer of information;
  6. The fundamental elements of a cryptocurrency, from an investigative point of view, are the blockchain, user devices and communications between them;
  7. It is necessary to think about the paradigm of responsibility, built around an imputation at least for guilt: in the blockchain context, it is not necessarily possible to find the author of an error;
  8. There seem to not be any valid public policy arguments to limit and even less to prohibit the use of promising technologies such as blockchain and smart contract;
  9. Bitcoin is distributed under a MIT license so new software developments based on Bitcoin have no commercial limitations;
  10. Solidity language is distributed under GPL v.3: every application on Ethereum must be distributed as free software (copyleft);
  11. GDPR is based on centralization, therefore, it is in contrast with the decentralized systems where all peers carry out data processing activities without a real distinction between data controllers, data processors and authorised processors
  12. Smart contracts may contain obligations with legal validity;
  13. Smart contracts that meet the requirements under contract laws can be considered legal contracts;
  14. The advantage of smart contracts is the possibility to have a built-in antidote to contractual issues;
  15. Decentralized autonomous organizations are entities based on smart contracts where decisions are taken on a decentralised basis;
  16. Blockchain and smart contracts may revolutionise corporate governance for example through the tokenization of shares that would allow to record, track and transfer shares on the blockchain with rights built within the tokens;
  17. The usual creation process of smart properties is the tokenization through which the ownership of a good or a right is transferred on a DLT and built within a smart contract;
  18. Blockchain technology may be applied as a dispute resolution system in order to speed up the filing of evidences and to guarantee their integrity and the certainty of the data.

State of the Art in the Academic Legal Tech Scenario

Legaltech looks like an unstoppable wave currently led by US-based tech companies. However, academics and lawyers are also aware of this trend as well-evidenced by the recent “Lawyering in the Digital Age” conference organised at Allen&Overy’s offices in Amsterdam by Professors André Janssen and Pietro Ortolani from Radboud University, along with Prof. Michel Cannarsa from Lyon Catholic University, Prof. Larry DiMatteo from the University of Florida, Prof. Francisco de Elizalde from IE University Madrid and Prof. Mateja Durovic from King’s College London (by the way, many of them are members of Jur’s Scientific Committee and this is not by coincidence).

Raffaele at Lawyering in the Digital Age

Academics and lawyers are willing to take on the challenge to understand how new technologies fit in the current legal landscape, even the ones that appear to be too distant from established principles such as responsibility, applicable law and jurisdiction. It is indeed undeniable that artificial intelligence and blockchain require a radical change in interpreting and applying such principles: a true paradigm shift.

As witnessed in Amsterdam, new technologies should not be perceived as a threat to lawyers but as an incentive to develop new skills such as computational logic and coding.

Also, lawyers need to change their attitude toward technology and to the legal profession because routine activities, basic legal research and simple contract drafting will be performed by software while legal professionals will be required to offer added-value strategic and creative legal consultancy that only the human intellect may perform.

This article was co-written by CLO Raffaele Battaglini and Lawyer Marco Tullio Giordano.

Authors:

Blockchain
University
Smart Contracts
Legaltech
Press Release
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Jur
Jur.io

Written by Jur

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Open Justice. Worldwide.

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