This essay expands on the keynote address I prepared for the Symposium sponsored by Wayne State University Law School and the Wayne Law Review. The focus of the Symposium was how private and public actors explore blockchain technology against a backdrop of traditional functions used or performed by both sets of actors. My address focused on the agency questions that coding, commonly known as "smart contracts," enabled by blockchain technology raise. In this broader essay, I look at longstanding questions about property and agency, and how those two legal concepts can work with and be affected by uses of blockchain technology. This essay concludes that, as uses of blockchains expand, we may need to undertake repetitive examinations of how their uses affect our traditional thinking about property and agency law and how that thinking may affect other bodies of law. We should not dispose of traditional norms in evaluating the legal responsibilities among counter-parties that use new technologies, however, just because they are using new technologies to assist in their dealings. In fact, it may be that well-tested norms of property and agency law may matter more when new technologies are used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
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