Dispute resolution is a fundamental aspect of human relationships be it social, professional, or business relationships. Many circumstances impact in the execution of contractual agreements and processes.

Contractual disputes

Disputes over contracts aren’t always caused by ulterior motives or deliberate intentions to short-change another party. Sometimes, they may be as a result of honest mistakes or inadequate understanding of the original contract.

However, no matter the reason behind controversies and disputes during the execution of contractual agreements, there is usually the provision for settlement systems that are supposed to interpret the terms and conditions of the given contracts and deliver fair judgment.

The court driven oracle solution

Many smart contracts define external sources of information (oracles) that rule some aspects of the contract.

When Court Oracle defines some specific label to mean some specific value related smart contracts can execute related transactions allowing the use of Civil Law and Court jurisdiction to allow for conventional dispute resolution to be applied in blockchain based smart contracts.

Users on this platform can create deals and have them registered on the blockchain as bound to judiciary resolutions, but executed as transparent smart contracts. This enables every fact and detail of the deal to be available and traceable in case of any dispute.

This proposal is seriously considered by blockchain experts working for Spanish Technical Committee of Digital Judiciary (CTEAJE, by its spanish initials).

No changes to Civil Procedures are needed to create this technology extension, but judiciary related government bodies need to support an interoperable technical service to be managed transparently and available to all courts.

One specific challenge is to deal with appeals procedures, since different levels of judiciary framework can produce different judgements.