The Biographical Core of Law: Privacy, Personhood, and the Bounds of Obligation

Abstract

Contemporary critical legal studies scholarship pays heed to a perspective of materiality in law that jurisprudence more generally has tended to overlook. In keeping with a broader “nonhuman turn” in the humanities and the social sciences, this growing body of scholarship has been observing the passage of law through nonhuman realms. But how wide – and how indiscriminately – can the legal bond cast the net of its dignity? Is not the dignity of law rather connected with human subjectivity in deep and indissociable ways? This paper seeks to contribute to the debate above by querying the quintessential realm where law and human subjectivity intertwine – i.e. privacy. Questioning into the origin of the force of privacy obligations enables us to see its inherent connection with the origin of the force of law itself, and to draw important conclusions from this connection.

Keywords: privacy; personhood; law; artificial intelligence; anthropocene; Bruno Latour

JEL Classification: K10; O33