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Comment by omarchowdhury | Hacker News Reader

If we enter a contract that we all know is intended to be immutable, why would a judge not enforce that? I can understand buried and obfuscated immutability clauses, but if the parties know exactly what they're getting into, the parameters of justice are contained.

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Judges throw out contracts that both parties agreed to on a regular basis, even if both parties knew exactly what they were getting in to.

Agreement is not the only prerequisite for a legally enforceable contract. The contract also needs to avoid certain unenforceable things like unconscionable clauses, or agreements to do things that are illegal.

> why would a judge not enforce that?

Because the purpose of a judge is to interpret the law, not enforce Ethereum software invariants.

the parameters of justice are contained

It just doesn't work like this.

Thank you for this.

I guess that settles it then!

We (tech geeks) tend to think of situations like this as analogous to code, where the local declaration supercedes the global one. We see a specific investment platform with specific terms and rules and our gut says those override more general ideas about how it should work because they're more immediate to the context.

But civil society is the opposite: Contracts cannot violate the law; the law cannot violate the constitution. The justice system would care about the terms of the DAO only insofar as those terms fail to conflict with the law, which includes a massive body of precedent in contracts and torts.

There can be an immutable smart contract which is in compliance with the law (though you have to be more specific with which law, but for these purposes I know we mean US law).

Point being, immutability is not sufficient to demonstrate that a contract is in conflict with the law.

But it's impossible to prove that a smart contract (or any contract, for that matter) is in compliance with the law until it goes in front of a judge and all possible appeals have been exhausted, and that's what matters here.

Every single second, mountains of new information becomes relevant. Parties cannot know what they are getting into, because they cannot see the future. They can only make assumptions.

But that's basically obvious to anyone not hinging their personal identities on peddling technocratic revolution.

But history is full of successful unmodified contracts despite non-omniscient actors.

History is full of everything.

Omniscience has never been a requisite for mutual material success.

Neither have contracts.

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