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Smart Contract Templates: Legal semantics and code validation
Journal of Digital Banking,
2
(4),
338-352
(2018)
Abstract
The Smart Contract Templates project supports legally enforceable smart contracts, using operational parameters to connect legal agreements to standardised code. The standardised code is derived from legal documentation and performs some or all of the provisions of that contract. For financial contracts such as derivatives agreements, the legal documentation may be extensive, and the standardised code to perform the contract may be substantial. An important issue is how to validate whether the smart contract code will correctly perform the provisions of the legal contract. This requires an understanding of the semantics of legal text and is an important step towards supporting industry adoption of legally enforceable high-value smart contracts.
Keywords: smart contract; Smart Contract Templates; semantics; automation; distributed ledger
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Author's Biography
Christopher D. Clack is a senior lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at University College London (UCL), one of the world’s leading research universities. He has over 30 years’ research experience at UCL in modelling and simulation, programming languages, system architectures, genetic computation and financial computing. He has secured funds exceeding UK £4m for research, knowledge transfer and teaching and has founded and led a series of highly successful initiatives at UCL and elsewhere, including the Thomson-Reuters Laboratory at UCL and the UK Financial Services Knowledge Transfer Network. He holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Natural Sciences from Cambridge and a Master’s degree in Computer Science from UCL. In 2009, he was awarded the Doctor of Science (ScD) by the University of Cambridge.
