Regulation by Blockchain: the Emerging Battle for Supremacy between the Code of Law and Code as Law
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This paper critically examines the intersection and interactions between conventional law produced and enforced by national legal systems (ie the ‘code of law’) and the internal rules of blockchain systems, which take the form of executable software code and cryptographic algorithms operating across a distributed computing network (‘code as law’). In so doing, it seeks to identify whether, and to what extent, ‘regulation by blockchain’ will successfully avoid governance by conventional law. It identifies three different ways in which the code of law is likely to interact with code as law, based primarily on the intended motives and purposes of those engaged in activities in developing, maintaining or undertaking transactions upon the network. It argues that these different classes of case are likely to generate different kinds of dynamic interaction between the blockchain code and conventional legal systems, and critically examines the normative foundations of these emerging and anticipated interactions.
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Many technologies consciously resist existing institutions of regulation and control.
“The reason for this is twofold: first, many technologies consciously resist existing institutions of regulation and control (Yeung, 2019), and second, it is often unclear whether existing institutional trust-production logics are prepared to incorporate planetary-scale technology networks.”
From Mediated trust: A theoretical framework to address the trustworthiness of technological trust mediators (2021) · cites this paper as Yeung, 2019
The Abstract identifies blockchain uses undertaken with the express intention of evading legal limits, which supports the idea of deliberate resistance. But it also describes uses that complement conventional law, and it does not establish that many technologies generally resist regulatory institutions. (LLM, conf=0.86)
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Examining public views on decentralised health data sharing
Neumann, V., Davidge, G., Harding, M., Cunningham, J., Davies, N., Devaney, S., Leeming, G., Holm, S., & Ainsworth, J. (2023) · PLOS ONE · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0282257 · Cited by 9 · see citing works
“The concerns highlighted by our participants echo existing debates within legal literature around DLT application with regards to legal frameworks such as GDPR [3, 43, 44].”
- Authors
- Yeung, K.
- Affiliations
- Bar-Ilan University (IL)
- Corresponding author
- Yeung, Karen
- ORCID
- Yeung, Karen
- Venue
- The Modern Law Review
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2019-03
- Volume
- 82
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 207-239
- ISSN
- 0026-7961 (ISSN-L)
- 1468-2230
- OpenAlex
- W2896013446
- Cited by
- 101
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 6 · 2025: 25 · 2024: 11 · 2023: 16 · 2022: 11 · 2021: 10 · 2020: 11 · 2019: 10 · 2018: 1
- FWCI
- 21.10
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- Licence
- Locations
- Modern Law Review (publishedVersion)
- University of Birmingham Research Portal (University of Birmingham) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- Modern Law Review
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › General Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Digital Transformation in Law
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
- Social Sciences › Law › Digitalization, Law, and Regulation
- Keywords
- blockchain regulation, code as law, legal codes, smart contracts, governance by law, distributed ledger technology, law and technology
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