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I guess that settles it then!



We (tech geeks) tend to think of situations like this as analogous to code, where the local declaration supercedes the global one. We see a specific investment platform with specific terms and rules and our gut says those override more general ideas about how it should work because they're more immediate to the context.

But civil society is the opposite: Contracts cannot violate the law; the law cannot violate the constitution. The justice system would care about the terms of the DAO only insofar as those terms fail to conflict with the law, which includes a massive body of precedent in contracts and torts.


There can be an immutable smart contract which is in compliance with the law (though you have to be more specific with which law, but for these purposes I know we mean US law).

Point being, immutability is not sufficient to demonstrate that a contract is in conflict with the law.


But it's impossible to prove that a smart contract (or any contract, for that matter) is in compliance with the law until it goes in front of a judge and all possible appeals have been exhausted, and that's what matters here.




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