Code Is Law: From Hammurabi's Stone to Ethereum's Smart Contracts

June 17, 2016, 3:34 AM UTC. A screen glows in darkness. Lines of code execute in sequence. Sixty million dollars begins to move—not stolen, but transferred according to the rules. The code is doing exactly what it was told to do. No one realized what they were telling it.
This episode traces humanity's longest continuous engineering project: the 3,700-year quest to reduce justice to calculation, to make agreements self-enforcing, to remove human discretion from human promises.
• Hammurabi's Code (1754 BCE): The world's first source code—282 laws carved in stone, each following the same structure: If this, then that
• The Roman Protocol: How jurists invented legal abstractions that map directly to modern programming concepts
• The Twelve Tables: Rome's first public laws and the birth of legal transparency
• Medieval merchants and the Lex Mercatoria: Private law systems that enforced themselves through reputation
• Nick Szabo's vision: The cryptographer who imagined "smart contracts" decades before blockchain existed
• The DAO hack: When $60 million vanished because the code allowed it—and the community had to choose between immutability and justice
Law and code are not analogous. They are isomorphic. Same structure. Different substrate. Every contract you've ever signed follows the same if-then-else logic that Hammurabi carved in diorite 37 centuries ago.
The question that took us millennia to answer—and then spectacularly un-answer—is whether code should be law. This is the story of that question, and the sixty million dollars that proved we hadn't thought it through.