Agreement: “CODE IS LAW” BUT IS CODE A CONTRACT? - SMART CONTRACTS UNDER THE INDIAN CONTRACT ACT, 1872 AND THE INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY ACT, 2000

Record: kaal:position:2026-08-08-240 · 2026-08-08

Code Is Law but Is Code a Contract? states that the legal enforceability of self-executing blockchain-code agreements remains fundamentally uncertain under Indian law. This supports the jurisdiction-specific enforceability-risk component of Kaal's claim. The abstract does not establish that such contracts are void or identify which formation, interpretation, condition, or remedy rules must change.

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 the legal enforceability of self-executing blockchain-code agreements remains fundamentally uncertain under Indian law. This independently supports the jurisdiction-specific enforceability-risk component of Kaal's claim, while it does not establish that such contracts are void or identify which formation, interpretation, condition, or remedy rules must change.

Current debate

“CODE IS LAW” BUT IS CODE A CONTRACT? - SMART CONTRACTS UNDER THE INDIAN CONTRACT ACT, 1872 AND THE INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY ACT, 2000

Scholarly basis

kaal:claim:2998033-004
Wulf A. Kaal, Blockchain Innovation for Private Investment Funds (2017). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2998033
Source PDF sha256: aafb1be3c25cd33da477d759df9ca2f856f0a8fe133d6396da2e75d0af573dbd

Evidence and mapping

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

Topics

smart-contracts law-and-legal-systems historical-response scholarly-literature crossref

Provenance

Affirmed in kaal-review:2026-08-08:continuous-crossref-0028-global-unique-all-0042-reviewed-v1 on 2026-08-08. Review record.

Verify

Canonical markdown sha256: 20af7b916918aa1a7fed1c79bbcad748875043051e45f5f38e24e18e67a1549d
curl -s https://wulfkaal.github.io/positions/2026-08-08-240.md | sha256sum