The Law and the Inner Self (LAWINSEL) Project, funded by an Irish Research Council (Consolidator) Laureate grant, was launched in September 2022. The core project team consists of Felicitas Benziger (Postdoctoral Researcher), Talya Deibel (Senior Postdoctoral Researcher) and Patrick O'Callaghan (PI).
In this blogpost, we outline our progress in the second year of the project (2023–2024).
Click here for information about the project aim and objectives and our research activities during the first year of the project (2022–2023).
Progress and Publications on the First Objective of the Project
First Body of Jurisprudence: The Medieval Lawyers (11th to 14th Centuries)
A highlight of our work on this body of jurisprudence is Talya's 15,000-word paper on the Roman concept of iniuria (damage to personality) in which she traces the emergence of a legal design for the protection of the inner realm. This paper is currently under review at an international journal.
You can find further information about our work on the first body of jurisprudence here.
Second Body of Jurisprudence: Legal Humanism and Natural Law (15th to 17th Centuries)
Patrick leads the research on the second body of jurisprudence. In 2023–2024, he has been searching for evidence of early modernity's turn to the inner self in legal scholarship of Hugo Donnellus (1527–1591) and Johannes Althusius (1557–1638), amongst other lawyers. He also studied contemporary works of literature, philosophy and theology. Patrick is currently writing up this research and aims to publish a paper on this topic in 2025.
You can find more information about the second body of jurisprudence here.
Third Body of Jurisprudence: The Enlightenment (18th Century)
We plan to undertake the bulk of our work on the third body of jurisprudence in 2024–2025. However, Felicitas has been busy collecting relevant materials during her field trips in November 2023 and June 2024 to the Berlin State Library and the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory in Frankfurt.
You can keep up to date on our work on the third body of jurisprudence on this page.
Fourth Body of Jurisprudence: Individualism (19th Century)
The main work on the fourth body will take place during the third year of the project in 2024–2025.
Our work during 2023–2024 has consisted of sourcing and collecting key materials. During her field trips, Felicitas investigated and collected relevant German materials on personality rights.
This webpage will be updated with developments in our work on this body of jurisprudence.
Fifth Body of Jurisprudence: Human Rights (20th and 21st Centuries)
Felicitas is leading the research on the fifth body of jurisprudence. Highlights over the last year of work include a chapter by Felicitas on the right to freedom of thought in the ECHR. This chapter will feature in The Cambridge Handbook of the Right to Freedom of Thought, which will be published in early 2025 and is co-edited by Patrick and Bethany Shiner who is an associate scholar in the project.
Currently, Felicitas is also completing a full-length paper on the protection of the inner self through human rights in the digital era.
You can find more information about our work on the fifth body of jurisprudence here.
Sixth Body of Jurisprudence: Digital Transformations (21st Century)
Talya leads the work on the sixth body of jurisprudence. An especially novel aspect of the methodology in this strand of our work is the use of insights from the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). In 2023, Talya published an open-access chapter explaining how STS can be of use to lawyers when addressing the challenges arising from digital transformations.
Highlights in 2023–2024 include a paper written by Talya on neurotechnology, with a particular focus on neurohacking and its implications for personality rights. This paper is currently under review at an international journal. Patrick has also written a book chapter on mental integrity and privacy, together with Bethany Shiner. This chapter adopts the transhistorical methodology of our project, tracing the evolution of privacy law in the common law across several bodies of jurisprudence. This chapter will be published in The Law and Ethics of Freedom of Thought (Palgrave), edited by Marc Blitz and Christoph Bublitz.
You can find more information about our research on the sixth body of jurisprudence here.
Dissemination of Research at Conferences and Workshops
Throughout 2023–2024, we were busy disseminating the project's research at academic conferences and workshops. You can find a full list of these activities on our outputs page. Here are some highlights:
Netherlands Institute for Law and Governance (NILG) Conference, September 2023. Patrick was invited to participate in the NILG Annual Conference on 15th September 2023 where he presented ongoing research under the fifth and sixth bodies of jurisprudence. Patrick's paper was entitled ‘The Right to Freedom of Thought: Using Common Law Principles to Answer the Threshold Question’ and he subsequently published a blogpost based on this paper.
Beyond Boundaries: Persons, (Bio)Technologies, and the Law Workshop, October 2023. Talya was invited to present her work in the sixth body of jurisprudence at a workshop organised by the Everyday Cyborgs 2.0 Project and Hybrid Minds Project at Gladstone's Library, Wales on 2nd October 2023. Talya's paper was entitled 'On Neurohackers and Cyborgs: Legal Personality and its Open Future'. You can read more about Talya's paper here.
Harvard Law School Law & Philosophy Society, February 2024. Our team was invited to present the project at an online meeting of the HLS Law & Philosophy Society on 29th February 2024. Patrick presented the conceptual framework of the project while Felicitas and Talya presented their research under the fifth and sixth bodies of jurisprudence respectively.
Bridging the Gap Between Neurorights and Cyberights Conference, March 2024. Felicitas and Talya presented their research under the fifth and sixth bodies of jurisprudence at a conference held at the Sant’ Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa from 20th–21st March 2024. Felicitas' paper was entitled 'The Protection of a Person‘s Inner Self through Human Rights in the Digital Era' while Talya's paper was entitled ‘Neurotechnology, Hybridities and Law: On Private Law and Modern Boundaries’.
Socio-Legal Studies Association Annual Conference, March 2024. Felicitas presented a paper entitled 'Generative Artificial Intelligence and the Inner Self: Mapping out an Approach to Defining the Inner Self in the 21st Century' at the SLSA annual conference, University of Portsmouth on 27th March 2024.
Radical Humanities Laboratory, May 2024. Our team organised a panel on 'Socio-Technical Futures and the Inner Self' at the inaugural conference of the Radical Humanities Laboratory, University College Cork on 9th May 2024. We presented an overview of our project, focusing in particular on socio-technical challenges, and engaged in discussions with scholars from other disciplines, including philosophy, anthropology and STS.
World Congress of Philosophy, August 2024. Because many of our project's research questions are fundamentally philosophical in nature, we are eager to explore our ideas with philosophers interested in theories of the self. Against this background, we organised a roundtable on Law and the Inner Self at the World Congress of Philosophy on 14th August 2024 at La Sapienza University, Rome. You can find more information about the roundtable here.
Knowledge Exchange Activities
Alongside our participation in academic conferences, we engaged in a range of different knowledge exchange activities, including:
Interactions with Key Stakeholders
In March and April 2024, Patrick, Felicitas and Talya participated in consultations with the Rapporteur of the Drafting Group on Neurotechnology and Human Rights for the Advisory Committee to the United Nations Human Rights Council. Patrick was invited to co-author a formal submission to the Advisory Committee on the potential role of the right to freedom of thought in the context of neurotechnology. This report has been published on the website of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Inter- and Cross-Disciplinary Activities
Talya organised a workshop on the theme of 'Inner Self/Outer Other' at the Nordic Summer University Winter Symposium in Vilnius, Lithuania on 8th March 2024. The workshop brought together 18 participants from law, political science, interaction design and software engineering, computer science, sociology, philosophy, theatre and music.
On 24th June 2024, our team participated in a workshop with members of the CyberSocial team based at UCC seeking to promote cross-pollination of ideas and explore potential for future collaborations between our projects. Talya has co-authored a paper entitled 'The Inner Self in Urban Techno-Politics: Smart Cities and Planned Persons', which will be published in an edited collection being produced by the CyberSocial team.
Research-Led Teaching
Felicitas and Talya brought our ongoing research into the classroom, providing guest lectures to students in Ireland and abroad. In November 2023, Talya was invited to teach a class on ‘AI, personhood, and responsibility’ at Maynooth University. Also in November, Felicitas presented the objectives of the LAWINSEL project and some of her current research under the fifth body of jurisprudence to the postgraduate IP Law class at UCC. In June 2024, Felicitas and Talya, drawing on project research, delivered online guest lectures on legal personhood and personality rights to students at the Leuphana University Lüneburg.
Looking to the Year Ahead: Highlights
In Year 3 of the project, we aim to complete the research under objective 1 and transition to the work for objective 2.
Our research plans for 2024–2025 are still taking shape but here are some emerging highlights:
In the upcoming period, the research team will be contributing to several book projects including the Cambridge Handbook of Human Rights for the Mind (Felicitas, Talya, and Patrick), the Routledge Handbook on AI, Law, and Society (Talya) and the Edward Elgar Research Handbook on Privacy and Confidentiality in Media Law (Felicitas and Patrick).
We will present project research at the Hybrid Minds Conference in Geneva in October 2024.
Patrick has been invited to present his work on memory and forgetting at the conference of the Italian Association for Law and Literature (AIDEL) at the University of Verona in November 2024.
Talya has been invited to give a guest lecture on her research on neurotechnology and the inner self to students at the University of Amsterdam in December 2024.
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