James Grimmelmann and A Jason Windawi, ‘Blockchains as Infrastructure and Semicommons’, William and Mary Law Review (forthcoming 2023), available at SSRN. In popular culture, blockchains (to the extent they are understood at all) are associated with cryptocurrency, and following the crypto crash of 2022, increasingly dismissed as part of a classic asset bubble. But legal scholars are more sanguine. They tout the potential of blockchain, or, more prosaically, ‘distributed ledgers’, to transform private law, from contracts to securities to property. Blockchains are hoaxes or panaceas depending on which source you consult. James Grimmelmann and A Jason Windawi’s sparkling essay, ‘Blockchains as Infrastructure and Semicommons’, charts a path between these two extremes. It does so by calling attention not to what blockchains can do for law, but rather by focusing on the novel question of what legal theory can tell us about how blockchains work … (more)
[David Fagundes, JOTWELL, 12 December 2022]
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