At the moment, there is no third party settling a dispute. All that really happened is that there was consensus that this was 'a hack / theft' in all sense exce

At the moment, there is no third party settling a dispute. All that really happened is that there was consensus that this was 'a hack / theft' in all sense except for the 'code is law' interpretation. Now, it seems that the thief was afraid of legal reprecussions, but that is sort of outside the scope of ethereum. It happens purely 'off chain'. The interesting exception to this story is the original DAO heist. Where an Eth hard-fork was made to reverse the heist. In this case there was an intervention. That intervention took broad consensus of miners and developers. So it takes a pretty big effort to get disputes "resolved" away from what the smart contract says. That is an interesting deviation from normal contracts before a court. Personally, I do think that Eth should not have forked the DAO heist away, but I understand why they did.