This article has been prepared for the research purpose of identifying, disclosing, and justifying certain trends in the development of civil law and procedures in the context of the spread of smart contract practices and the expansion of their spheres of application. At the moment, there is no uniform approach to choosing an optimal form for the legal regulation of smart contracts within the system of contract law in modern legal systems or international law; meanwhile, globalization and the digitalization of the economy imply the growth of cross-border transactions. The emergence of smart contracts is due to the development of e-commerce, in which the parties’ interactions are carried out electronically instead of in physical exchanges or direct physical contact. Smart contracts gaining popularity in circulation are based on two interrelated elements: firstly, they eliminate a person’s direct participation in some or all cases of executing the agreement using an automated code designed for execution without reference to the intentions of the contracting parties after publication; secondly, they make use of decentralized blockchain technology, and also provide automatic code execution without any party’s potential intervention, so as to eliminate or reduce the self-control and third-party control of the commitment.This study examines the content, conclusion, validity, protection of rights and legitimate interests of the parties, interpretation, and legal nature of smart contracts. The research materials used foreign experience in resolving disputes from smart contracts on digital platforms (Kleros, JUR, Aragon Network Justice, OpenCourt, OpenBazaar), as well as domestic and foreign literature on smart contracts. This research has been prepared based on general (deduction, dialectical analysis, intersectoral relations of objects) and specialized (comparative-legal, economic-legal) methods of scientific experimentation.The authors conclude that there are no grounds for considering a smart contract as a new classification element of the system of contractual regulation (type or kind of contract). In addition, the analysis shows that the resolution of smart contract disputes through digital platforms remains radically uncertain, and currently is not creating obvious advantages in comparison with traditional judicial proceedings.

The article considers the problem of digitalization of judicial activities in the Russian Federation and abroad . Given the fact that in the modern world elements of digital (electronic) justice are gaining widespread adoption, the article presents an analysis of its fundamental principles and distinguishes between electronic methods of ensuring procedural activity and digitalization of justice as an independent direction of transformation of public relations at the present stage . As a demonstration of the implementation of the first direction, the article

The article analyzes such a trend in the development of modern civil procedure as the specialization of judicial activity. The authors identify judiciary and judicial aspects of the specialization of judicial activity, different mechanisms of such specialization are given, their variability is justified. On the basis of the experience of different legal orders (Australia, England and Wales, Germany, India, Spain, Italy, Russia, USA, France, etc.) the forms of judicial specialization are shown. Thus, examples of functioning of independent courts for administrative, intellectual, labor, family, land, bankruptcy, financial, and patent disputes are shown. Mechanisms of judicial specialization are also formulated, in particular, branch division of procedural order of consideration and resolution of cases; division into kinds and subspecies of proceedings according to substantial-legal or procedural-legal feature; creation of procedural peculiarities of consideration and resolution of certain categories of cases caused by substantial-legal feature of a case; creation of procedural peculiarities of cases consideration in reviewing instances courts.

The article raises the question of the consequences of detecting errors in the choice of the type of legal procedures not only at the stage of trial in first instance, but also at the stages of verification of court decisions. The authors conclude that at the appeal stages the court should check whether the trial under the rules of an improper type of procedure led or could have led to the illegal and unjustified adjudication. If such circumstances are discovered, the judicial act should be canceled, and in exceptional cases, the case should be returned to the court of first instance. In other cases, the conversion to trial under the rules of other procedure may be carried out at the appeal or cassation.

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