Public Administration and the Challenge of Contractual Automation. Notes on Smart Contracts

Contracts represent the most advanced and least explored frontier of public sector digitisation policies. Smart contracts, totally or partially self-executive contracts operating in the blockchain ecosystem, already widely used in the private sector, received, in Italy, at the beginning of 2019, regulatory coverage, ensure high standards of efficiency and allow to contain the phenomena of maladministration. Contractual automation is close, on the legal level, to the provisional one, but it preserves some irreducible peculiarities as well as specific limits, such as the tendential incompleteness of the negotiation regulations, which can, however, be remedied by exploiting the most recent innovations in the field of artificial intelligence.