Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Cryptolaw for Distributed Ledger Technologies: A Jurisprudential Framework

ORCID (Links to author’s additional scholarship at ORCID.org)

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2448-8309

Abstract

Both governments and private entities increasingly turn to distributed ledger technologies (DLT) for more efficient and transparent ways to implement administrative and other processes. When so doing requires grafting legal concepts onto computer code, changes will ripple outward to affect other areas of the law. Treating DLT as a foreign legal system allows comparative law to illuminate five areas of jurisprudential disruption from moving legal processes to DLT-based systems: substantive legal changes, new regulatory actors, legal structure changes, law-lag reduction, and legal culture changes. This article explores such ripple effects in the context of DLT-based corporate share registries in Delaware. The article argues that, in addition to changes to the Delaware General Corporation Law, DLT-based share registries may impact corporate law in other substantive ways, see the rise of new regulator-like entities, and magnify the shift in corporate culture reflected in the unicorn and platform technology company phenomena.

Publication Title

Jurimetrics

Document Type

Article

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