Personalized Law: Different Rules for Different People

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: Omri Ben-Shahar, Ariel Porat
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 05/31/2021
Pages: 256
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.15lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.30w x 1.00d
ISBN: 9780197522813


Review Citation(s):
Choice 03/01/2022

About the Author

Omri Ben-Shahar is the Leo and Eileen Herzel Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School, and the Kearny Director of the Coase-Sandor Institute for Law and Economics. He writes and teaches in the areas of contract law, consumer law, insurance law, trademark law, food law, and
law-and-economics. Ben-Shahar is the co-author of More Than You Wanted To Know: The Failure of Mandated Disclosure (with Carl Schneider, Princeton Press 2014). Ben-Shahar is currently serving as a Reporter for the American Law Institute's Restatement of the Law, Consumer Contracts.

Ariel Porat is the Alain Poher Professor of Law, and the President of Tel Aviv University. He is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and the EMET Prize Laureate (2014). He teaches and writes in the areas of tort law, contract law, and remedies. Porat is the co-author of Getting Incentives
Right - Improving Torts, Contracts, and Restitution (with Robert Cooter, Princeton Press, 2014) and Tort Liability under Uncertainty (with Alex Stein, Oxford University Press, 2001). In the years 2003-19, Porat was a Fischel-Neil Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago Law
School. He was also a visiting professor at the universities of Columbia, Stanford, NYU, Berkeley, Virginia, and Toronto.