Layers of Law
In a piece regarding the relationship between the technology of the blockchain and society, the legal interface, a layered stack emerged. This piece expands that idea.

1. Planning - Making "Yes" Better
   
   1. Planning happens differently depending on the circumstances, but let's schematize. Let's presume the parties have found one another and now want to increment their relationship by, for instance, agreeing to keep one another's confidences, lend some money, benefit from some service.
   2. They need to decide on documents - to "self-legislate" the "law of the parties":
      1. Find a range of paradigms, practically speaking some documents, set of documents or precedent transactions;
      2. Evaluate separately and collectively adopt;
      3. Bridge differences;
      4. Sign; and
      5. Launch performance.
   3. The law of the parties is the focus of CommonAccord. This is based on text and collaboratively developed by lawyers. For parties, selecting the right one mostly depends on social knowledge, following their lawyer's recommendation, or that of reputed experts or their peers. The coding community shows how to collaborate on text efficiently. That can be combined with traditional legal methods of model docs, codification and commentary. Big data methods can also help.
   4. Sign and Perform are the domain of the blockchain and other methods.
2. Automatic Performance - The Democratizing Effect of the Blockchain
   
   1. "Automatic Performance" covers a range of activities that may now not be automatic at all. A decision to make something available, transfer it or terminate it currently can involve paperwork and actions by one or a group of persons. Or the automation is a back office function of a service provider, closed to the other, and often only vaguely known by the frontline people of the provider.
   2. The democratizing effect of the blockchain is that the automation can be shared, owned by neither party, subject to scrutiny by users, followed, forked and merged like open source software.
   3. This is a radical change for the user, who obtains equal standing with the service provider vis-a-vis the protocol. While most users of a service will not directly study the code, just as most users do not inspect source code (or even privacy terms) of apps they download, they will be able to rely on social knowledge (follow). The black box aspect of service providers, including governments, will be reduced. Functions of the black box (object/office/administration) can be securely exposed and shared.
   4. Pragmatically, the blockchain is an alternative to waiting on hold for a person to tell you that it can't be done.
3. Reputation
   To be iterated.
4. Bespoke Dispute Resolution
   
   1. Dispute resolution is a critical part of a transaction platform and the core of the legal function. It is the equivalent of error handling. A good dispute resolution solution makes things upstream work better.
   2. It's core function is to apply human judgment to a situation that was unanticipated.
   3. To be effective, a dispute resolution system must be able to get to a decision on the merits rapidly and cheaply. It should be alert to manipulation.
   4. If parties can plan efficiently and there is a mechanism for aggregating experience, then the dispute resolution process can be shaped by experience, following and forking at the planning layer.
   5. Disputes can be reduced in number and difficulty of resolution by:
      1. Clarifying the deal that the parties have agreed (layer one);
      2. Promptness of declaring the difficulty; and
      3. Evidence that is immediately available and relatively uncluttered.
5. Legal System
   To be iterated.

After the first two layers, which define "normal" performance, each layer handles bugs thrown by the previous layer. Bugs move down. Feedback and improvement will move edge-cases back up the stack, where execution is more efficient than the layer below. CommonAccord addresses the first layer. The blockchain intersects with the first layer and can profoundly change the second layer. The combination can profoundly impact the rest.