> Contracts are agreements that are meant to be legally enforceable.
You have hit on an important point, but like most commentators here and elsewhere, you seem entirely to have failed to recognize its significance. In the American and English tradition of common law, a contract is an agreement made with the intention that it be subject to legal enforcement [0]. Not every agreement is meant to give its parties recourse to legal remedy, and hence not every agreement is a contract. That is, not every agreement is subject to contract law [1].
It is of little significance that people in the Ethereum community (or in the broader crypto-asset community) have taken to calling their programs "smart contracts"; the name signifies nothing. In the main, and particularly in the case of the DAO, it has been made clear, ad nauseum, that these programmatic agreements are not meant to be subject to legal enforcement; in short, it has been emphasized from the start, and at every intermediate step, that smart contracts are not contracts in the legal sense. Indeed, the major motivation for the development of programmatic agreements (i.e., "smart contracts"), has been to supplant enforcement de jure by enforcement de machina.
The law allows for agreements that do not have the force of law behind them, and naturally the law says little about such agreements. For this reason alone, absent separate provisions which purport to invoke legal enforcement of the intent behind the code that implements a smart contract, it is perfectly reasonable, legally speaking, to argue that prima facie these agreements are not subject to contract law.
Thus the independence of programmatic agreements from legal constraints is legally plausible; this is a very different situation from the legally absurd arguments put forth by some crypto-zealots that, for example, transfers of cryptocurrencies are not subject to laws restricting money transmission.
Now, might a judge decide that any particular programmatic agreement—or "smart contract"—is in fact a legal contract? And that therefore the judge, not the code, ultimately determines who gets what? Sure. Judges tend to decide that they get to decide, when there's any question about it. But it's not unreasonable to imagine that a judge might really say, "No, this is not a legally enforceable contract. It says so right on the box." And if that happens, then what the code says goes.
1. Beyond the determination of whether the agreement is legally a contract, I mean. In particular, I mean to point out that a so-called "smart contract" might well be legally deemed not to be a contract at all, and therefore not subject to the provisions of contract law that give precedence to the parties' intent in the agreement over its literal interpretation. In other words, if a programmatic "smart contract" is not legally a contract, there is no legal reason that the law should favor any outcome other that what the code's execution ordains, or that the law should say anything on the subject at all.
You have hit on an important point, but like most commentators here and elsewhere, you seem entirely to have failed to recognize its significance. In the American and English tradition of common law, a contract is an agreement made with the intention that it be subject to legal enforcement [0]. Not every agreement is meant to give its parties recourse to legal remedy, and hence not every agreement is a contract. That is, not every agreement is subject to contract law [1].
It is of little significance that people in the Ethereum community (or in the broader crypto-asset community) have taken to calling their programs "smart contracts"; the name signifies nothing. In the main, and particularly in the case of the DAO, it has been made clear, ad nauseum, that these programmatic agreements are not meant to be subject to legal enforcement; in short, it has been emphasized from the start, and at every intermediate step, that smart contracts are not contracts in the legal sense. Indeed, the major motivation for the development of programmatic agreements (i.e., "smart contracts"), has been to supplant enforcement de jure by enforcement de machina.
The law allows for agreements that do not have the force of law behind them, and naturally the law says little about such agreements. For this reason alone, absent separate provisions which purport to invoke legal enforcement of the intent behind the code that implements a smart contract, it is perfectly reasonable, legally speaking, to argue that prima facie these agreements are not subject to contract law.
Thus the independence of programmatic agreements from legal constraints is legally plausible; this is a very different situation from the legally absurd arguments put forth by some crypto-zealots that, for example, transfers of cryptocurrencies are not subject to laws restricting money transmission.
Now, might a judge decide that any particular programmatic agreement—or "smart contract"—is in fact a legal contract? And that therefore the judge, not the code, ultimately determines who gets what? Sure. Judges tend to decide that they get to decide, when there's any question about it. But it's not unreasonable to imagine that a judge might really say, "No, this is not a legally enforceable contract. It says so right on the box." And if that happens, then what the code says goes.
0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intention_to_be_legally_boun...
1. Beyond the determination of whether the agreement is legally a contract, I mean. In particular, I mean to point out that a so-called "smart contract" might well be legally deemed not to be a contract at all, and therefore not subject to the provisions of contract law that give precedence to the parties' intent in the agreement over its literal interpretation. In other words, if a programmatic "smart contract" is not legally a contract, there is no legal reason that the law should favor any outcome other that what the code's execution ordains, or that the law should say anything on the subject at all.