Except that in real-world contract and criminal law, there are various mechanisms that attempt, with some degree of success, to dissuade fraudulent behavior and allow for some form of restitution. Blockchain currencies, on the other hand, have been promoted partly on the premise that they are free of this sort of governmental interference.
You can put anything in "real world" contracts (in a 'put words on the paper' sense), but there are things that would be considered illegal if brought to court. In a sense there are reasonable defaults. So if you sign without reading a contract that 'you sell your self as a slave to me' this contract would have no power because slavery is illegal.
But real world contracts are never 100% clear, and can be modified retroactively in court when their terms violate the law, are vague, or are otherwise deemed unenforceable.
Unless the attacker is careless enough to reveal his identity, or puts his ill-gotten gains at risk of being hacked back, or the victims are Ethereum foundation members, your chances of restoration are slim to none.
Yes. If one party makes a mistake, or does something underhanded/surreptitious, you have no recourse. This exact situation (a bug in the DAO contract leading to a malicious actor stealing from the DAO) led to the recent Ethereum fork: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14819268
Which is just my point. It's not that no means of recourse exists outside the contract code; it's that there exists no option between zero and global thermonuclear war. The broad range of subtleties that contract law has developed to answer complex situations, and the option to exercise judgment in those cases not yet captured by precedent, is completely absent in Ethereum, because the people who designed it saw no reason why any such thing should be needed.
Unfortunately, that they failed to see it doesn't mean it isn't so, and now every new conflict among blockchain participants is an exciting new opportunity to reinvent another piece of several hundred years' worth of too hastily discarded prior art.
We did devalue the dollar against the gold standard significantly in 1934. Not entirely unlike a "fork", since it's a declaration that, whoops, your dollars are now worth 40% less gold than you thought.
In 1931 Britain floated the pound, which arguably the US ought to have done too. Suddenly, your paper is no longer convertible to gold at a fixed rate. That's an even more dramatic change than the Ethereum fork.
More accurately - judges and lawyers interpret law, contract and otherwise. This sort of interpretation is explicitly ruled out in Ethereum's case, except when enough stakeholders decide it's not.
This is true with real world contracts too, that's why people hire lawyers - they understand the "code" of contract law.