We live in a world of one-size-fits-all law. People are different, but the laws that govern them are uniform. “Personalized Law”―-rules that vary person by person―-will change that. Here is a vision of a brave new world, where each person is bound by their own personally-tailored law. “Reasonable person” standards would be replaced by a multitude of personalized commands, each individual with their own “reasonable you” rule. Skilled doctors would be held to higher standards of care, the most vulnerable consumers and employees would receive stronger protections, age restrictions for driving or for the consumption of alcohol would vary according the recklessness risk that each person poses, and borrowers would be entitled to personalized loan disclosures tailored to their unique needs and delivered in a format fitting their mental capacity. The data and algorithms to administer personalize law are at our doorstep, and embryos of this regime are sprouting.
Should we welcome this transformation of the law? Does personalized law harbor a utopic promise, or would it produce alienation, demoralization, and discrimination? This book is the first to explore personalized law, offering a vision of law and robotics that delegates to machines those tasks humans are least able to perform well. It inquires how personalized law can be designed to deliver precision and justice and what pitfalls the regime would have to prudently avoid. In this book, Omri Ben-Shahar and Ariel Porat not only present this concept in a clear, easily accessible way, but they offer specific examples of how personalized law may be implemented across a variety of real-life applications.
Author(s): Omri Ben-Shahar, Ariel Porat
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 264
cover
Half title
Personalized Law
Copyright
Dedication
Table of Contents
Preface
1. Introduction
Diary: A Day in the Life of David and Abigail
The Plan of the Book
Part I
2. What Is Personalized Law
Contextualization: The Old Precision Law
Personalization: The New Precision Law
Personalized Rules Everywhere
Self-Personalization
Personalization and the Objectives of the Law
Conclusion
3. The Precision Benefit
Personalized Everything
The Benefits of Personalization
The Benefits of Personalized Law
The Production Costs of Precision
Conclusion
Part II
4. Personalized Legal Areas
Tort Law: The “Reasonable You”
Risk-Based Personalized Standards
Skill-Based Personalized Standards
Are Personalized Standards of Care Just?
Consumer Protection Law
Two Dimensions of Personalization: Value and Price
The Potential Pitfalls of Personalized Consumer Protections
Criminal Law
Benefit-Based Personalization
Detection-Based Personalization
5. Personalized Regulatory Techniques
Personalized Default Rules
Personalized Mandated Disclosures
Personalized Compensation
Personalized Bundles of Rights and Duties
6. Personalizing Rules by Age
Age as Input into Legal Commands
Age as Output of the Legal Command
Trouble with Using Age as Input
Part III
7. Personalization and Distributive Justice
Personalized Rules and Relevant Criteria
Conflicts Between Distributive Justice Goals and Other Goals
Using Personalized Law to Advance Distributive Justice Goals
Personalized Law and Discrimination
Suspect Classifications
Data Echoing Historical Biases
Fixing Uniform Laws’ Unequal Impact
8. Personalized Law and Equal Protection
The Constitutionality of Statistics
Individualized Treatment
Narrowly Tailored
Three Arguments for Differential Treatment
Disparate Impact
Conclusion
Part Iv
9. Coordination
Coordination of Group Activity
Coordination of Individual Acts
Coordination and Information
Coordination as Participation
10. Manipulation
Distorted Investment in Human Capital
Pretending
Arbitrage
Ways to Restrain Manipulation
Immutable Characteristics
Hypothetical Characteristics
The Numerosity of Characteristics and Commands
Preventing Arbitrage
11. Governing Through Data
What Information is Required for Lawmaking?
Where will the Information Come From?
Obeying Personalized Commands
Privacy and Data Protection
People’s Interests in Privacy
Society’s Interest in Data Protection
12. Conclusion: Legal Robotics
Law and Artificial Intelligence
The Human Design
Tomorrow Morning
Index
