A Formal Treatment of Contract Signature
| Autor: | van der Meyden, Ron |
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| Rok vydání: | 2020 |
| Předmět: | |
| Druh dokumentu: | Working Paper |
| DOI: | 10.1109/TSC.2021.3101833 |
| Popis: | The paper develops a logical understanding of processes for signature of legal contracts, motivated by applications to legal recognition of smart contracts on blockchain platforms. A number of axioms and rules of inference are developed that can be used to justify a ``meeting of the minds'' precondition for contract formation from the fact that certain content has been signed. In addition to an ``offer and acceptance'' process, the paper considers ``signature in counterparts'', a legal process that permits a contract between two or more parties to be brought into force by having the parties independently (possibly, remotely) sign different copies of the contract, rather than placing their signatures on a common copy at a physical meeting. It is argued that a satisfactory account of signature in counterparts benefits from a logic with syntactic self-reference. The axioms used are supported by a formal semantics, and a number of further properties of the logic are investigated. In particular, it is shown that the logic implies that when a contract has been signed, the parties do not just agree, but are in mutual agreement (a common-knowledge-like notion) about the terms of the contract. Comment: This paper has been accepted to IEEE Transactions on Services Computing. Revisions to the previous version include expanded material on smart contracts in Section 9 |
| Databáze: | arXiv |
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