Wow, the substance of that dispute is... this is why people incorporate in Delaware. Nobody thinks the caselaw of Delaware is some sort of divinely ordained ideal corporate law. But it's
predictable and
thorough, which means you can write contracts in that framework and know what's going to happen. It seems theoretically possible to me that you could encode all of that in a smart contract library, but I am very curious to see if you actually could.
(One of the things you get in Delaware and many many other meatspace jurisdictions is the doctrine of contra proferentem, i.e., ambiguous clauses are read to the detriment of the person who wrote the contract and made the other person sign it. In this case, there is clearly an ambiguous clause, at least in the sense that the parties disagree on it, and clearly one party wrote it and the other party had no ability to negotiate it. This rule incentivizes people to a) write unambiguous contracts and b) not play stupid games where they try to invent interpretations of their own contract so they don't have to do the thing they said they would.)
Anyway, to the meta-level of the arbitration / escrow - if I'm reading right, the only reason it went to arbitration is Kleros voluntarily put up 50 ETH, the entire amount under dispute, into a new cryptographically-binding arbitration contract, and the two parties had a verbal agreement that the result of that arbitration would end their dispute?
Which is to say, if Kleros said "We're happy to go to arbitration but we're not going to lock up 50 ETH while it's being disputed," the process would be stuck? And especially if Kleros said "There's no reasonable argument here, we're right," arbitration wouldn't actually be binding on them? (It seems they only entertained the dispute to show off their arbitration product....)
And also, if it went to arbitration and the claimant lost, nothing would prevent the claimant from saying "I never agreed to this, and I still have a dispute with you"?