Oxford Business Law Blog

Following the recommendations suggested by the Ibero-American Institute for Law and Finance, Ecuador implemented the most ambitious corporate law reforms observed in Latin America in the past decades...

On 25 November 2021, the Law Commission published an Advice to Government on smart legal contracts. In this post, we provide a brief overview of our project and our conclusions. We also discuss, as...

Algorithmic trading—where two computer programmes deal directly with each other—is a commonplace of modern securities trading. However, in general such trading occurs under a framework contract which...

In a direct response to the 2008 global financial crisis, someone using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto published a white paper discussing Bitcoin, a novel method for transmitting value without an...

Blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies are stimulating investment, business activity, and media attention, as well as passionate visions of industry disruption and societal transformation. As...

The Centre for Banking & Finance Law (CBFL) at the Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore is holding a conference on the Future of Banking and Finance in the Digital Era on 9 - 10 March...

The revolutionary potential of blockchains in driving legal change has been long promised but sluggish in delivery. Our forthcoming paper suggests that the mismatch between promise and reality stems...

Trust is an integral aspect of all human relationships. Trust facilitates social cooperation and coordination. Contractual relationships are no exception. Non-legal mechanisms such as reputation and...

Autonomous Systems and the Law (C.H. Beck/Nomos 2019) by Nikita Aggarwal, Horst Eidenmüller, Luca Enriques, Jennifer Payne, and Kristin van Zwieten (eds) is a collection of papers dealing with the...

The question of how people can trade with each other independently of national laws is a question that has kept philosophers, economists and lawyers busy for centuries. In recent years, the...

Blockchain technologies promise to execute tasks that have traditionally been settled by legal institutions. Some providers of such technologies explicitly offer ‘to act as a digital jurisdiction’...

Inspired by present technological advances we redefine a financial derivative contract which is able to be processed in a fully digital and algorithmic way. OTC Derivatives and their historic...

Blockchain technology could reshape the economic institutions of capitalism, to borrow the title of a celebrated book by Oliver Williamson. In a recent paper, I deal with contractual agreements that...

The term ‘smart contract’ refers to computer code that is designed automatically to execute contractual duties upon the occurrence of a trigger event. Referring to a 1997 paper by Szabo, the simple...

Recent developments in 'smart' digital technologies, in particular blockchain technology, are changing and challenging the framework in which business is conducted. A prominent feature of the...

This blog post tackles the problem of defining smart contracts. In particular, it reviews the existing definitions of smart contracts in some of the main laws enacted and scholarly articles published...

Reporters are in the habit of looking at emerging technologies in isolation when describing their benefits, and that’s certainly the case with biometrics, blockchains, smart contracts, artificial...

Proprietary, sophisticated computer algorithms are a hidden yet central element of how we work and play today. Businesses use algorithms internally to make decisions and improve their service...