Smart Contracts: Code, Normativity and Legal Change in Saudi Arabia

Smart contracts use code as the vehicle of contracts, which avoids the abstraction and vagueness of human language contracts. This shift from language to code reorients the nature and meaning of legal principles and rules since smart contract code is deterministic and automatic whereas language is abstract and vague. The execution of code becomes the interpretive focal point by which legal principles will need to be assessed, reoriented and modified to facilitate this mode of code-based contracting. The magnitude of these changes may be particularly significant in relational contract cultures such as Saudi Arabia whose traditional contracting rules and principles offer a markedly different theory of contract than the classical theory of contract in western legal traditions. Using a comparative law methodology, this study assesses how Saudi contract law might deal with smart contracts, focusing on bedrock principles such as consent and mandatory terms like good faith, capacity and certainty.