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I disagree.Excellent! and I disagree with you, so we disagree. Where does that leave us? Simply as two proponents of free speech... unless... unless we have a smart contract between us, one under which you just drained my Ethereum account of ether. Beyond being a proponent of free speech, that gives me "standing" to become a "litigant", a "plaintiff" against you as "defendant". You would get to tell your side to the judge, just like me.
Here are some exaggerated hypothetical examples where you will agree with me; then hopefully you can see how a judge would look at the present situation with the DAO:
If, buried in TheCodeThatIsLaw that AllPartiesKnewAndAccepted, there is encoded an agreement to deliver narcotics to children, or sell children into slavery, or to provide funding to a terror training cell for children, then it wouldn't matter what TheCodeThatIsLaw says, a court would declare it invalid, NotAContract, NotBinding. Even if we encoded it in language that says "this is the funding part, being non-specific about the activities". That's simply how it works. Period. And you can't write a binding contract to give money away, there's no consideration.
TheCodeThatPurportsToBeLaw must meet standards of its own in order to provide additional binding law, the standards I outlined above, a meeting of the minds, consideration, and reliance. So when it comes to challenging the results of TheCodeThatPurportsToBeLaw, courts will look inside, and they will look for AMeetingOfTheMinds, and they will look at what actually happened, how people behaved, and the court will decide if TheCodeThatPurportsToBeLaw fulfills the requirements that all contracts must fulfill in order to be binding.
My point is not that these contracts are invalid; my point is that these contracts are not free from interpretation by courts, and they are not free from meeting the standards of contracts as seen and interpreted by the courts, and not as seen by one party to the agreement who got what they wanted.
And, by the way, contracts can't contain ponzis. No matter how many signatures, lawyers, notaries, and PhDs in economics are involved in forging the agreement, TheCodeThatIsLaw is not the law if the code contains a ponzi. That's how the law works. I'm talking about US law (we are talking .com here) but other countries of laws use similar methods of determination.