Kate Sills, software engineer at Agoric, explains the design choices for the secure smart contract framework they've developed, and how they incorporate e-rights into an interoperable cross-chain world. Agoric is one of the founding members of the IBC steering committee and has been instrumental in the development and specification of the protocol. Kate has written on the intersection of technology and law for libertarianism.org.
“Contract Law and the State of Nature” by Anthony T. Kronman (1985). The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, Volume 1, Issue 1, SPRING 1985, Pages 5–32. A great introduction to mechanisms of contract enforcement outside the state.
Rules for a Flat World: Why Humans Invented Law and How to Reinvent It for a Complex Global Economy by Gillian K. Hadfield (2016)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29587067-rules-for-a-flat-world
Assurance Contracts: mechanisms for incentivizing the creation of public goods.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assurance_contract
Dominant Assurance Contracts
https://www.cato-unbound.org/2017/06/07/alex-tabarrok/making-markets-work-better-dominant-assurance-contracts-some-other-helpful
Agoric’s Electronic Rights Protocol (ERTP). How cryptocurrencies and digital assets are minted on Agoric’s platform.
https://agoric.com/documentation/ertp/guide/
https://github.com/Agoric/ERTP
Agoric’s Zoe framework for smart contracts:
https://agoric.com/documentation/zoe/guide/
https://github.com/Agoric/ERTP/tree/master/core/zoe
The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else
by Hernando de Soto https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/86154.The_Mystery_of_Capital
The Digital Path by Mark S. Miller and Marc Stiegler (2003). A paper on how smart contracts can be used for property title, pre-Bitcoin.
https://agoric.com/assets/pdf/papers/digital-path.pdf
Finding The Greedy, Prodigal, and Suicidal Contracts at Scale  (2018) https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.06038.pdf
Great paper that characterizes a number of problems that smart contracts can have, and how common they are. They used symbolic execution to search through nearly a million contracts for indicators of various problems.