Qualification: “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:2026-08-08-241 · 2026-08-08

Code Is Law but Is Code a Contract? concludes that the Indian Contract Act requirements of offer and acceptance, consideration, capacity, free consent, and legality can each be satisfied in a smart-contract interaction when interpreted in light of blockchain architecture. This directly qualifies Kaal's disruption claim. The abstract does not establish equivalent treatment elsewhere or resolve flexibility and judicial-oversight concerns.

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 qualification.
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 concludes that the Indian Contract Act requirements of offer and acceptance, consideration, capacity, free consent, and legality can each be satisfied in a smart-contract interaction when interpreted in light of blockchain architecture. This is a direct jurisdiction-specific qualification of Kaal's disruption claim, while it does not establish equivalent treatment in other jurisdictions or resolve flexibility and judicial-oversight concerns.

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:5554218-001
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 qualification
Mapping confidence: 0.62
Mapping ambiguous: false

Topics

smart-contracts 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: 33a25f0b639ad94699c3f9d16d914647465f5231e60b613abcfa94864cb3446d
curl -s https://wulfkaal.github.io/positions/2026-08-08-241.md | sha256sum