1 research outputs found
A Formal Treatment of Contract Signature
The paper 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 paper 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.Comment: This paper has been accepted to IEEE Transactions on Services
Computing. Revisions to the previous version include expanded material on
smart contracts in Section