Conflict-Of-Law and "Non Law" Renovation of the Lex Mercatoria, Smart Contracts and Blockchain Arbitration

The central institute of private international law — conflict of law — in the modern globalization and information context is evolving, which is largely due to the paradigm shifts in law, laid down and developed based on international commercial arbitration. The widely interpreted concept of «rules of law» actualizes a completely new view of conflicting arrays of rules: the law of the state and the system of non-state regulators. The medieval lex mercatoria, revived in the XX century, is modernized by cyberspace, acquires a new sound in the form of e-merchant or lex informatica, especially in the context of the parallel development of smart contracts and new decentralized forms of dispute resolution, one of which is blockchain arbitration. In particular, the issues of conflict of law, traditional for cross-border transactions, arise in relation to smart contracts, which, using blockchain technology, are inherently linked to several jurisdictions. It is important to reflect on the questions of applicability of traditional conflict-of-laws bindings to the regulation of relevant relations, including through forecasting the practice of choosing the law of a state, the substantive rules of which are adapted to the use of new technologies, or recourse to the rules of non-state regulation.

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