Decentralized Justice

= "Decentralized justice is a new approach to online dispute resolution that combines blockchain, crowdsourcing and game theory in order to produce resolution systems which are radically more efficient than existing methods". [1]

Discussion

Federico Ast:

"The key question for a court system can be framed as follows: How to design a mechanism able to produce true decisions efficiently and in such a way that it is compatible with the ethical beliefs of a community?

Throughout history, different communities have given different answers to this question, depending on the technology available to them and their system of beliefs. In ancient Athens, trials were conducted by large bodies of randomly selected voluntary citizens. The merchant courts of the Middle Ages were based on peer judges via the Lex Mercatoria. Contemporary legal systems put legal decisions in the hands of professional attorneys and judges.

Since the 1990s, the Internet has drastically changed the world’s economic systems and humankind’s ability to organize social cooperation. Global connectivity enables crowds to collaborate online in unprecedented ways. Over time, crowd intelligence succeeded in producing a collaborative encyclopedia such as Wikipedia, a sophisticated operating system such as Linux and a decentralized monetary system such as Bitcoin.

The wisdom of crowds can also be leveraged for a radical transformation of ODR systems. The field of decentralized justice seeks to leverage blockchain and mechanism design in order to build dispute resolution procedures able to efficiently and fairly address the new types of disputes of the digital age. It is decentralized because the process is fully driven by peers and built on blockchain technology and cannot be controlled by any single agent. It is justice because the design complies with a number of conditions to be considered fair by the people using it."

(https://stanford-jblp.pubpub.org/pub/birth-of-decentralized-justice/release/1? )

More information

• see: Blockchain Online Dispute Resolution Projects ; [2]
• Decentralized Justice Platforms
• Online Dispute Resolution

* Article: When Online Dispute Resolution Meets Blockchain: The Birth of Decentralized Justice. by Federico Ast. Stanford Journal of Blockchain, Law and Policy, June 2021

URL = https://stanford-jblp.pubpub.org/pub/birth-of-decentralized-justice/release/1?

"This paper reviews the main theoretical principles underlying the nascent field of decentralized justice and the early empirical experience in real life use cases. Part of the Blockchain & Procedural Law seminars (Max Planck Institute Luxembourg for Procedural Law).

The Online Dispute Resolution ("ODR”) industry was born in the 1990s. As the Internet became a part of people’s everyday lives, many also sought to leverage the web’s potential for the creation of virtual courts that would greatly increase the efficiency of dispute resolution procedures. This vision, however, failed to fully materialize. To some extent, early ODR solutions only brought an incremental innovation that streamlined existing alternative dispute resolution procedures, but did not create any disruptive innovation with the potential of generating a more than 10x advantage over existing methods. In recent years, a number of technological innovations in computer networks such as blockchain and the growing use of cryptocurrencies enabled new types of mechanism designs for online dispute resolution. This emerging approach, which may be called decentralized justice because of the decentralized nature of blockchain and of juror networks, enables the possibility of a radical increase in the efficiency of dispute resolution. This Essay reviews the main theoretical principles underlying the nascent field of decentralized justice and the early empirical experience in real life use cases."