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 presents a philosophical and legal study of relationship between the concepts of vice, sin and crime. On the basis of modern criminological analysis, the authors conclude that the main cause of crime lies in the objective existence of human vices associated with the weakness of human nature. As a part of the study of criminal cases, the authors formulated a generalized criminological portrait of a personality of a police officer who commits corruption crimes. The authors argue that criminalization of a personality goes through several successive stages: vice, passion, sin (immoral behavior, administratively punishable act, and the highest degree is a crime). The authors propose to consider corruption from two sides: 1) as an independent personal vice and 2) as a reflection (result) of the vices of society. The corruption crime is examined by using the triangle of Donald Craessy. On the basis of this approach, the authors argue that social causes alone do not trigger corruption behavior. Only vices push an offender to corrupt behavior. As a mean of preventing of official misconduct, the authors propose moral and ethical standards of official conduct.

There has been a widespread use of blockchain-based smart contracts in various financial and property sectors, gaining popularity in recent years. By greatly simplifying the economic turnover, the potential efficiency and profitability arises from the fact that smart contracts use software to perform certain tasks through automated processes, minimizing the involvement of intermediaries and, therefore, significantly reducing transaction costs. The wide spread of new technologies always gives rise to various problems, and legislation is often not adapted to the pace of socio-economic changes in the state. Despite the positive side of such technological development, the consequences may entail certain dangers for the participants of this kind of relationship. The absence of the very concept of smart contract in the legislation of most states gives rise to undoubted difficulties in determining their legal essence. The presented study examines the current state of smart contracts in Malaysia, examines the viability of the Malaysian legal framework in relation to the practice of using smart contracts and blockchain technology, and analyzes legislation and policy documents in force in Malaysia.

Nowadays it is difficult to imagine a stable political environment without the functioning of political parties in modern democracies. In order to cover new or existing political views and stimulate the formation of new parties, the legislation regulating the activities of political parties is dynamically developing. The state also creates various restrictions on the way to continue the activities of existing parties or the formation of new ones, especially in multi-party democracies, where a multiplicity of parties creates confusion for voters, and can lead to instability in the activities of the government or parliament. For the stable functioning of a political party, there is a need for clearly defined legal requirements that it must follow, and for its registration it must comply with all formalities prescribed by law, including those related to the preparation of a set of documents. These reasons determine the relevance of the problems of legal regulation of registration of political parties. All these processes are observed in Australia, where over the past 30 years have been significant reforms that entailed the legal consolidation of political parties in the electoral process. The requirement for a relatively low membership for the party registration in Australia facilitates the formation of parties that seek to solve local or regional problems, and the possibility of creating representative offices and regional affiliates of political parties contributes to defending regional and local interests without violating the state’s national integrity and unity of the system of state power, as the basis of a federal system. To register the party at the federal level and the level of a number of states, it is also possible to use the rule of “parliamentary representation”. Achieving a balance between different regimes of party registration facilitates the organization of candidates in clearly structured groups, ensuring equal conditions for political competition.

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