Dear Reader,

I am excited to announce the launch of Project Libre.Law.

Libre.Law undertakes to create a universally operable, open source repository of code deployed in the Rust programming language freely accessible to all without prerequisite legal training to use for creation of peer to peer commercial transactions self executing on a distributed ledger. It is to provide the common source of code for actuating legal consequence as the necessarily required first step in the logic sequence leading to the smart contract generation, i.e. the next generation of the smart contract. It consists of the axiomatisation of the components of commercial transactions into a radix of code from which to arithmetize a formulaic contract creation, “axiomatisation for arithmetization.” It designs to produce this next generation smart contract to be legally cognizable and enforceable in each of its applicable host jurisdictions, complete with its internalized dispute resolution protocol operating always within the confines of Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT). It serves to facilitate next generation smart contract creation as the cornerstone of the Open Waters Initiative driving symbiotic integrations to ensure the delivery of those technologies fostering personal independence via its requisite economic autonomy, thus ubiquitously enabling every individual worldwide to enter the global stream of commerce for ones own personal profit. This Initiative is designed to render the world of economic activity accessible to all by removing its barriers to entry presented by prohibitive transactions cost of legal contract creation and financial intermediation, as well as prohibitively costly dispute resolution.

My lifelong mission to achieve a construct of economic justice is substantially furthered by the Libre.Law advancements toward the minimization of transaction costs as a necessity for realization of a genuine socioeconomic amelioration. This finds an independent pillar of support in, simultaneously informed by, the seminal work of Ronald Coase, Nobel Laureate, demonstrating the taxing impact of non-zero transactions costs substantially restricting microeconomic activity, a phenomenon previously recognised among economists only by inference while generally having been excluded from examination in economic models by deliberately fictitious assumption of zero transaction costs for modelling simplicity. This I cite for its consequence our current, centralized economic infrastructure poses in hinderance of socio-economic progress especially afflicting those at the bottom of its pyramid most in need of betterment of the human condition, whose sine qua non lies in the promise of flourish held by the decentralisation of our economic structures enabled only in a correspondingly enlightened governance. Distilling five decades of professional contract drafting with my purposeful examination of the matter beginning in the 1980s the effort now culminates in a solution via innovative deployment of DLT to yield at once a radix of code concomitant with technological feasibility of access to all, layperson and professional alike. It is the distributed computing sequel to two concurrent historical progressions: the first running toward a facilitation of commerce by universally harmonized principles, as represented by the formidable Uniform Commercial Code in the United States, the second running toward that of a commercial democratisation of access to legal solutions, among the most well known being Legal Zoom. While this trend has since progressed still further to the advent of laudable projects purporting to “put law on blockchain” including that of OpenLaw “stitch[ing] together traditional legal agreements with blockchain-based smart contracts,” the incongruity between these two inherently incompatible systems necessarily constrains all such efforts to a priori failure of efficacy in achieving the mission. The apparent similarity of logic between code and contract once completed, easily tempting of this approach, belies the underlying divergences of their respective pathways to formation. Consequently, the promise of DLT for socio-economic amelioration has failed to come to fruition.

Libre.Law departs fundamentally from prevailing thought in this recognition of requiring that a de novo result oriented dynamics paradigm be ideated from its foundation for an organic functionality in a distributed ledger environment. Thus the architecture of the Libre.Law construct posits the operational functionality of “code as law,” while negating the fallacious adage of “code is law” as a false identity: whereas code operates by pure function of logic, law operates by function of logic upon an encumbrance of legacy, analogous to vast repository of orphan code skewing the inherently expected output of a given input. Accordingly, the project will draw from very recent advances in an esoteric area of pure mathematics to devise an entirely new transactional logic for the creation of the radix of code, as all of computer science, itself, was founded upon innovative application of the the formerly obscure area of mathematical logic. The project has already achieved a completion of a core protocol of fair exchange incorporating dispute resolution mechanism entirely on DLT. Complete with this legally cognizable alternative dispute resolution mechanism the platform characteristics are intended to operate analogously to that of a virtual machine operating in parallel atop an “immutable operating system” as is every legacy legal structure evolved in an historical context. Its design will be specified to be inherently compliant with any host legal system whose characteristics recognize both the well established common law principle of the citizen’s freedom of contract and which also expressly regard alternative dispute resolution as legally cognizable within its jurisprudence. This inherent compatibility with legacy law uniquely will deliver the indispensable capability of that which may be regarded as a “system call” upon the host legal system safeguarding enforcement of the resulting output of its dispute resolution; its linearity of output instructed by the science of history superseding constraint of legacy. This construct delivers to humankind precisely that complete and accessible peer to peer transactional platform enabled by DLT to ensure trust among trustless actors in disparate communities across jurisdictional regimes, autochthonous societies with industrialized economies alike, to forge in equality a unity of commerce.

This freely open source treatment of “code as law” is strikingly similar to the customary practice among the legal profession of freely sharing document source among practitioners, competing on the strength of higher level attributes of the human interaction rather than on document repository wealth or the mere mechanics of document preparation. This construct is intended to foster impact by relevance, as law is servant to the community it serves, in a context of interoperability within a technologies ecosystem whose necessary integrity of security seeks an entirely auditable, open stack. The developed free and open source radix of code will be governed by a broadly permissive license under constraint maintaining strict, unbridled adherence to freely auditable, modifiable and redistributable use of code. It is intended to serve a community position similar to that of the Linux kernel, allowing adoptions by the social purpose for profit business model encouraging capital formation necessary for scale of implementation via free market forces, akin to a “Red Hat Linux” adaptation of the Linux kernel. This is by design with the expectation to incentivise application specifically in the sphere of cross border transaction formation where that margin of barrier to entry is at its greatest, the sphere of international trade, where the risks of uncertainty are also at their greatest. Likewise, this is a sector of economic activity where its socio-economic impact may be most readily ascertained. While the macroeconomic detriment of the transaction never having been formed for its barrier to entry is immeasurable, its sheer order of magnitude in trade may be easily illustrated inversely by cursory, ultra conservative evaluation of the economic impact of DLT based tools of enablement: postulating of a mere .01 addition to the World Trade Organization 2024 estimate of 32 Trillion USD of international trade would yield a 320 Billion USD growth in economic output, with the overwhelming majority of such output benefiting the small, individual actor, precisely those at the edge!

The mission is now well underway to be realized driven by our CIMA.Science team of brilliance, led by the power of imagination, with the courage to fail, perseverance to succeed.

Talk to us!