In many cases I would assume the opposite will occur: plaintiffs will claim that there was no contract formation because because the technical mumbo-jumbo of computer code is incomprehensible to a layman.
I suspect that courts will react quite favorably to this argument seeing as how they have a natural interest in maintaining their jurisdiction.
Why give up those rights and let a computer program (or rather, it's creators) dictate that you're screwed if you make a mistake? I mean, contract law exists because that kind of strict arrangement proved unsatisfactory in real life in the past.
In that case the judge can't do shit.
If you want the protections of courts, there is already a perfectly easy way to do that. And that is to use a real contract.
But if you explicitly do NOT want that, and explicitly DO want code to be law, that is what ethereum is for.
a judge can't take away the crytocurrencies of some anonymous other party.
> In that case the judge can't do shit.
In the latter case, I'm pretty sure that (even leaving aside other mechanisms that might apply), judges and courts exist in Russia. Agreements where the parties are based indifferent countries have long been a thing, and long been enforceable by courts.
Unmasking anonymous parties, obviously, can be (though it is not always, even where it must be done) a prohibitive burden to legal action, OTOH.
Agreement is not the only prerequisite for a legally enforceable contract. The contract also needs to avoid certain unenforceable things like unconscionable clauses, or agreements to do things that are illegal.
Because the purpose of a judge is to interpret the law, not enforce Ethereum software invariants.
It just doesn't work like this.
But civil society is the opposite: Contracts cannot violate the law; the law cannot violate the constitution. The justice system would care about the terms of the DAO only insofar as those terms fail to conflict with the law, which includes a massive body of precedent in contracts and torts.
Point being, immutability is not sufficient to demonstrate that a contract is in conflict with the law.
But that's basically obvious to anyone not hinging their personal identities on peddling technocratic revolution.
If Ethereum becomes popular enough, one day the participants in an Ethereum contract are going to sue each other, and the judge is not going to be impressed by arguments that the contract is intended to be immutable. You can't opt out of contract law just by saying that you opt out of contract law.