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On legal contracts, imperative and declarative smart contracts, and blockchain systems

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Abstract

This paper provides an analysis of how concepts pertinent to legal contracts can influence certain aspects of their digital implementation through smart contracts, as inspired by recent developments in distributed ledger technology. We discuss how properties of imperative and declarative languages including the underlying architectures to support contract management and lifecycle apply to various aspects of legal contracts. We then address these properties in the context of several blockchain architectures. While imperative languages are commonly used to implement smart contracts, we find that declarative languages provide more natural ways to deal with certain aspects of legal contracts and their automated management.

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Acknowledgements

The paper is an extended and revised version of Idelberger et al. (2016) presented at RuleML 2016 conference.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Data61, CSIRO, Brisbane, Australia

    Guido Governatori & Regis Riveret

  2. European University Institute, Florence, Italy

    Florian Idelberger & Giovanni Sartor

  3. Deontik, Brisbane, Australia

    Zoran Milosevic

  4. Data61, CSIRO, Sydney, Australia

    Xiwei Xu

Authors
  1. Guido Governatori
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  2. Florian Idelberger
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  3. Zoran Milosevic
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  4. Regis Riveret
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  5. Giovanni Sartor
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  6. Xiwei Xu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Regis Riveret.

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Governatori, G., Idelberger, F., Milosevic, Z. et al. On legal contracts, imperative and declarative smart contracts, and blockchain systems. Artif Intell Law 26, 377–409 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10506-018-9223-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10506-018-9223-3

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