A Formal Treatment of Contract Signature

【Author】 van der Meyden, Ron

【Source】IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SERVICES COMPUTING

【影响因子】11.019

【Abstract】The article 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 article 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.

【Keywords】M.12.1.a representation; M.10.1 contracts; M.10.3.c semantics of business protocols

【发表时间】2022 NOV 1

【收录时间】2023-01-14

【文献类型】理论模型

【主题类别】

区块链应用-实体经济-司法领域