This is the first in a series of posts about being a Lawyer in 2028.
We strongly believe that in ten years from now having a legal background - alone - will not be enough to understand humans and machines new needs, neither it will be enough to protect their new rights. Jurists have taken decades to understand the Internet, online copyright, online abuses and hate speech. Now they need to move faster: IoT, DLT and AI are here and are already demanding a regulation. We believe that there is no way to learn fast without knowing the technology itself.
In ten years from now the tecnolawyers will be fully educated and will be able to understand machines main issues, they will be able to write and read code. Actually, we believe that a lawyer will NEED to be able to write and read code, in order to enforce rights, duties, contracts and regulation directly on and for machines. Contract is the simplest way we can imagine a jurist can be useful, but it is not the only one: thinking on what the DLT has brought to us, DAO and Dapp, understanding and writing code will be a required skill to administrate the social life of the next generations of cyberspacer.
While we are still in 2018, we think that this is a good moment for a lawyer to learn how to code: Blockchain and DLT technologies have made smart contracts something that refer the legal sphere. A bunch of code can perform a contract and express the will to act or transact of the parties: we can leave all the fun to coders and software engineers, loosing our purpose in reading the Society needs and helping people to correctly settle down their obligations and litigations. Or we - as lawyers - can start to explore the rabbit hole and hope to find some help and comprehension in whom has been here before us and has already understood the power of these technological tools. Lose our role in society is sad, but lose our job and money because we can't fulfill people and machines needs is sadder.
We hope you reader want to comment and help us in our quest. We hope you reader will be curious and you doubt our tools and our approach.
we are going to wear legal hat, legal glasses and legal shoes: we are going trough this path trying to understand if it is true that the cyberspace can be ruled only by the lex cryptographia, if there is no more need of any "steel giant from the past", or if - as the market and most of the industry has proven in the past years - technology (even the most sophisticate) need the Law to be broadly adapted and trusted.
In this thread we are trying to learn how to code and write smart (legal) contract. There may be no technical difference between a smart contract and its "legal" brother - but with the eye of a lawyer - whenever there is a transaction there should be a contract to rule the obligations between the parties. This kind of self-executing contracts the role of lawyer is crucial: as a smart contract is self executable and potentially can start a chain of unstoppable events, the coder must be aware of what the code does and to whom asset.
We will start from scratch, choosing wisely our Operation System, the platform where we want to work on and the correct language.
During the next months we are trying to learn to code Ethereum smart contracts trough solidity: we are starting learning javascript ES6 on a Ubuntu 16.04 LTS pc.
We hope you like theory, because we are going to discuss the inner sense of DLT, contracts and code.
We hope you like reading, because for each post we are giving a cool book title to read and we will wait your books titles in the comments.
We hope you like coding, because we are going to need your help to understand what we are doing while typing.
Book of the day -> Blockchain and the law - Primavera de Filippi (2018)
Code of the day -> sudo apt-get update