Agreement: Book-Smart, Not Street-Smart: Blockchain-Based Smart Contracts and The Social Workings of Law

Record: kaal:position:2026-08-08-077 · 2026-08-08

Book-Smart, Not Street-Smart states that smart contracts privilege technical form while excluding the social contexts and complex human uses within which contracts operate. This independently corresponds to Kaal's criticism that code-is-law substitutes technical protocols for interpretive flexibility and normative deliberation. The proposition does not assess Kaal's proposed legal remedy.

Affirmed commentary position. This record extends a source-bound scholarly claim but is not a verbatim paper claim.

Holds when

The response is limited to the retrieved source proposition and mapped Kaal claim unless fuller source review supports a broader conclusion.
External evidence level: abstract indexed.
Mapping review tier: substantively reviewed abstract-level agreement.
Primary mapping confidence: 0.62.
The primary mapping cleared the automated ambiguity test; substantive scope remains review-bound.
Evidence is limited to an exact proposition in a Crossref-indexed abstract; full text was not reviewed.
No relationship is treated as external endorsement, citation, causation, or validation of a broader Kaal claim.
The source states that smart contracts privilege technical form while excluding social context and complex human uses of contracts. This directly corresponds to Kaal's criticism that code-is-law substitutes technical protocols and deterministic execution for interpretive flexibility and normative deliberation.

Current debate

Book-Smart, Not Street-Smart: Blockchain-Based Smart Contracts and The Social Workings of Law

Scholarly basis

kaal:claim:5554218-019
Furrer Andreas, Wulf A. Kaal, Universal Digital Law Codex (UDLC) Building the Legal Infrastructure for the Digital Era (2025). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5554218
Source PDF sha256: 55738b4035a91b70aa2ddaa127552fe4b373ec641afee2719fbdcabebdcbea44

Evidence and mapping

Evidence: abstract indexed
Review tier: substantively reviewed abstract-level agreement
Mapping confidence: 0.62
Mapping ambiguous: false

Topics

smart-contracts governance-design historical-response scholarly-literature crossref

Provenance

Affirmed in kaal-review:2026-08-08:continuous-crossref-0010-remainder-0002-reviewed-v1 on 2026-08-08. Review record.

Verify

Canonical markdown sha256: a69ed6cac463caa211f7a1b47bf1691f41769a63da606c50198e3d41fb688a50
curl -s https://wulfkaal.github.io/positions/2026-08-08-077.md | sha256sum