Codex: A Legal Scripting Language for Ethereum
I&#x27;m a lawyer and erstwhile software dev.<p>Edits in italic: <i>The idea that this will catch on in any non-trivial fashion</i> is such flagrant nonsense that I don&#x27;t know where to start. <i>Note that I didn&#x27;t see the author of this page saying that it will, but a lot of comments seem to indicate that this is the hope.</i><p>Most of law school is dedicated to being hammered over the head, repeatedly, with the fact that contracts constantly use this word:<p><i></i>REASONABLE<i></i><p>And many, many thick books written by a lot of very smart people have been dedicated solely to trying to define this word, which is hotly debated.<p>Quite simply, contracts are semantic documents that are used as reference for judgment based processes. Syntactic interpretation simply is never going to work, and that is all blockchain is going to get you. The existence of closing conditions to big deals (e.g. company sales) require <i>human judgment</i> - they are often things like &quot;the reasonable likelihood that there is no need for further tax indemnification&quot; or &quot;there is reasonable likelihood that there will be no further suits filed against [x]&quot;. How in the hell is a computer <i>ever</i> going to make determinations about the reasonable likelihood of human actors that are sufficient to have as bases for contract conditions? And even if they can, is that what you <i>want</i>? I still want a human&#x27;s finger on the trigger. And either way, until you have true AI interpreting contracts for you, this is a completely hopeless task. It so fundamentally misunderstands what attorneys do that it is just worthy of being dismissed out of hand.<p>Let&#x27;s put it this way: saying that contracts can be &#x27;coded&#x27; in this way is the exact same as thinking that all software developers do is write code.<p>I spend at least as much time writing contracts as I do trying to figure out what the heck it is that is actually going on, investigating, documenting requirements, satisfying stake-holders - it is not, unlike, in fact, writing software.<p>So, in essence, saying that contracts can be automated is literally the exact same statement that software development can be automated.<p>Show me how. I will make you wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of avarice.<p>NB: you may not read the TOS - but trust me, as someone who has written many, many website TOS&#x27;s, people do read them. Important people, like states Attorneys General, representatives from acquiring companies and competitors, attorneys representing people who are trying to sue you and members of the general public who actually give a darn about their privacy. And, quite frankly, TOSs are a tiny fraction of what I do - and I have a very brisk software practice.<p>The vast majority of actual commercial contract negotiation is in documents that are <i>heavily</i> worked upon by both sides and reviewed many times by multiple people. If you think you can get even 20% of these people to become effective at writing <i>markdown</i> much less learning logical operators, well, I have a bridge to sell you.