Smart Contracts Under Common Law: Code-is-Law Limits & Digital Jurisprudence

Smart Contracts Under Common Law: Code-is-Law Limits & Digital Jurisprudence

Autonomous cryptographic agreements executed on state machines present profound challenges to centuries of common law contractual doctrine.

The Triad of Formation: Offer, Acceptance, Consideration

Under classical contract jurisprudence:

1. Offer & Acceptance: Does compiling bytecode to a public mempool constitute a unilateral offer ad incertas personas?
2. Mutual Assent (Consensus ad Idem): When a compiler reorders instructions or a zero-day exploit executes unintended reentrancy, did mutual assent ever exist?
3. The Doctrine of Unilateral Mistake: Under Chwee Kin Keong v Digilandmall.com Pte Ltd [2005], if one party knows the counterparty is operating under a fundamental mistake regarding terms, the agreement is voidable ab initio.

Legal Equation of Breach vs. Machine Invariance

$\text{Liability} = f(\text{Subjective Intent}, \text{Objective Code}) \neq \text{Bytecode Output}$

When oracles feed manipulated liquidity pricing (flash loans), the contract executes deterministically according to EVM state rules, but fails the equitable doctrine against unjust enrichment (condictio indebiti).