News 3083 items
UK Law Commission To Start Research Into ‘Smart Contracts’ - ETHNews.com (ethnews.com)
The legal research body’s recent report includes plans to study executable distributed code contracts.

Published on July 19, the UK Law Commission's 2017-2018 Annual Reportdetails the authority's work throughout the year and its various recommendations for legal reform. Included in this year's review is a section dedicated to EDCCs (also called smart contracts).

Because of the numerous advancements and news coverage relating to EDCCs, the independent agency expects the contracts to be increasingly utilized by businesses to execute legal contracts. The report states:

"It is important to ensure that English courts and law remain a competitive choice for business. Therefore, there is a compelling case for a Law Commission scoping study to review the current English legal framework as it applies to smart contracts."

The document goes on to describe a forthcoming research project "to ensure that the law is sufficiently certain and flexible to apply in a global, digital context and to highlight any topics which lack clarity or certainty" as they relate to EDCCs.

The legal authority has started its initial research, and it expects the project to officially begin sometime this summer.This year's review is preceded by a December 2017 publication from the law commission that announced its interest in EDCCs.

"We will … be making sure the law supports cutting edge technical innovation such as automated vehicles and smart contracts," the authority noted.
The 2017-2018 report also includes discussion of reforms to anti-money laundering (AML) law.

The law commission believes that existing law incentivizes a high volume of poor-quality suspicious activity reports that lack significant intelligence value.

 With the publicity around crypto-related money laundering crimes, it is possible that these offenses are on the legal body's radar, although a final AML report will not be released until late 2018.

The UK delved into the legal and regulatory realm of crypto earlier this year. On April 6, the state's Financial Conduct Authority said that cryptocurrencyderivatives might qualify as financial instruments. In late May, the same authority announced it had launched an investigation into 24 crypto companies.

DANIEL PUTNEY


Daniel Putney is a full-time writer for ETHNews. He received his bachelor's degree in English writing from the University of Nevada, Reno, where he also studied journalism and queer theory. In his free time, he writes poetry, plays the piano, and fangirls over fictional characters. He lives with his partner, three dogs, and two cats in the middle of nowhere, Nevada.
ETHNews is committed to its Editorial Policy
    • 2
    Samuel Santos Sales & Growth Marketing at BC These technological developments are likely to have a disruptive effect on private law, both conceptually and practically. If the law is to remain relevant to commercial dispute resolution on a global scale, it needs to review its tools and concepts. This Law Commission research project will hopefully address some of these issues.
    • 1
    Francisco Gimeno - BC Analyst UK Law Commission see the inevitability of the arrival of new technologies and new instruments which need to have a clear position under the Law. The results of this research and its possible application into new regulations is very important as many countries which adapted years ago their own legal systems from the UK one look at UK for innovations on law which have to be very wide in aspect as we realise that the digital and technological development and advances are not waiting for the regulations to start working, they are already here and are continuously evolving. There are some fields, like in Biology, where only the common agreement on ethics stopped some research (e.g. cloning) before even regulators could start thinking about definitions. Fortunately we expect not to find these kind of deep ethical problems with smart contracts but nothing (short of a black swan situation) can stop the evolution of the digital ecosystem now. So, good luck to UK Law Commission to be smart enough to realise on how to protect the citizens and at the same time adapt to the new emerging landscape.