I believe an autonomous oracle gets closer to being an entity that would be able to legally enter a contract, however that would still come with the notion of “a jurisdiction”. In that framing, an oracle would need to justify the jurisdiction in which it is entering agreements, and there would need to be a proper justification to claim “international” if most of the nodes were being hosted in a geographically isolated region, i.e. would be hard to claim “international” if the nodes all existed within countries’ borders.
Further, the oracles would have to have status as either a “person” or a legal entity meaning that someone or some organization would have to establish the oracle’s personhood or legal status. That seems to be in line with what some of the oracle-inclined protocols have proposed as a future for “legal” smart contracts.
The author uses the example of “filling up the gas tank” as an automated contract that takes place between a person and a legal entity with the promise of gas being delivered upon payment clearance. The process and contract are automated, but an implicit contract exists between a company and a person. An oracle could easily play this role as long as there is some legal indication of an associated person or company that reports to a specified jurisdiction. Effectively, an oracle cannot be its own “law enforcement”, and in that context “self-enforcing contracts” is never an accurate term. “Self-executing” is not the same as “self-enforcing”, and the author argues that a contract by definition “cannot enforce itself” since the “enforcement” is the legal jurisdiction that would adjudicate a conflict and not the “execution” itself.