Pre-merge, nothing. Now you could probably take that judgement to a majority of staking validators and force their compliance.

For more decentralized blockchain the court has no way to force shutdown of a smart contract.

That’s the whole value proposition.

> Now you could probably take that judgement to a majority of staking validators and force their compliance.

That's if the validators reside within the courts jurisdiction. And another challenges is to find out who these validators are. While the wallet addresses are public, there is not a registry one can use to look up names and home addresses.

2/3 of the ethereum staking validators are domiciled in the United States, because they are hosted on centralized ethereum wallet services in that jurisdiction which offer staking. Or at least it was at one point after merge activation; I haven't checked in a while. It is quite easy to see where the stakers are located through traditional blockchain analysis tools.

Every non-criminal contract is essentially just question of money (or some property).

So take down contract, equal to return money (property), nothing more.

Question could happen in cases like Ponzi scheme, where subject just have not enough money (property), to cover liability, but this is ordinary thing, usually covered by Insurance Company or by government.

Courts can only make orders on parties of lawsuits. It can’t make broad orders against groups of people or non-entities.

What if the party is Ethereum Foundation? And the order is to remove a smart contract by change the source code?

Two things;

1. There are multiple implementations, written by different teams outside Ethereum Foundation, and the use of different implementations is encouraged. So Ethereum Foundation can't unilaterally change the code. Changes happen by rough consensus among different teams agreeing what to implement

2. Users who run consensus nodes are the final decision makers. If enough users decided not to adopt some team's code, or decided to run forked code, that would determine what rules the network uses.

We are seeing 2 start to play out, as all the core implementation teams coordinated via the Ethereum Foundation are against applying the Tornado Cash sanctions filter in code, but a large minority of consensus nodes appear to be applying that filter by running forked code. This influences the statistics of how the network treats those transaction, though it is not currently enough to completely filter them. Those users are institutional so they are more organised and motivated to comply, but it shows the power is not entirely in the hands of upstream implementers.

Orders who?

Insufficient context, a common problem with Ask HN questions. Delete it and try again.