[fpig]

I think that's the wrong question. If a court can decide (and enforce) what a smart contract "really means", then smart contracts don't really bring much to the table. It doesn't matter what the court would actually decide.

The main thing smart contracts bring to the table is a mechanism of enforcing contracts without government involvement or control. The contract gets enforced, period. The parties can be anonymous, it doesn't matter which country they're from, and so on.

[klodolph]

If a court can decide/enforce what a smart contract "really means", then the smart contract still decides who has possession of the related assets before the courts get involved. That's for ill or for good. Anyone who wants to get the courts involved has to care enough about changing the status quo to pay for a lawsuit. Changing what the status quo is, before the lawsuit, changes the balance of power.

[solveit]

Automation is valuable in itself. Imagine a system of thousands of smart contracts interacting with each other millions of times a second. No court system is (currently) equipped to deal with that except in the most superficial way.