>Smart contracts are supposed to eliminate a huge swath of disputes, so often people don’t need courts at all

That just sounds like near total agreement with me.

Dont get me wrong, I love smart contracts conceptually. But if the parties to a smart contract desired court arbitration, they should include a function for it in the smart contract. Like a swing vote for a trusted third parties keys.

Without that, to me, you are signalling acceptance of the outcome of the code without arbitration. If you seek a court to interfere with the execution of a smart contract that never included a provision for arbitration then you are in my mind, as guilty of ignoring the intent of the smart contract as any hacker might be.

And if you were just going to court to dispute the smart contract, you may as well just have accepted a legacy contract. Escrow, multiple parties, etc etc all solved problems in the traditional legal space.