Law and the Inner Self Project: Year in Review 2024/2025

The Law and the Inner Self (LAWINSEL) Project, funded by a Research Ireland Council (Consolidator) Laureate grant, was launched in September 2022. The core project team consists of Felicitas Benziger (Postdoctoral Researcher), Talya Deibel (former Senior Postdoctoral Researcher and now an Assistant Professor at Maastricht University) and Patrick O'Callaghan (PI).

In this blogpost, we outline our progress in the third year of the project (2024–2025).

Progress on the Bodies of Jurisprudence

Our project tracks and analyses connections between law and the idea of the inner self across the following six bodies of jurisprudence. We use developments in the field of personality rights as our central case study.

In 2024/2025, we expanded our work on all bodies of jurisprudence and explored new avenues of research enquiry. For example, in the first body of jurisprudence, we have extended our focus beyond Roman civil law to mediaeval canon law. We have also paid close attention to the liminal spaces between our bodies of jurisprudence. For instance, we have closely examined the writings of Christian Wolff (1679-1754) which we regard as a bridge between the second and third bodies of jurisprudence. We will continue our work on the bodies of jurisprudence during the final year of the project. Our findings will feature in our monograph, Law and the Inner Self: A Transhistorical Study, which we expect to publish in 2027.

Key Publications

Talya Deibel's The Civil Law and the Inner Self: Roman Iniuria and the Transformation of the Private Sphere was published open access in the Journal of Civil Law Studies in December 2024

Talya Deibel's Demarcation problems in law and neurotechnology: persons, cyborgs and neurohackers was published open access in the International Review of Law, Computers and Technology in February 2025

The Cambridge Handbook of the Right to Freedom of Thought, edited by Patrick

O'Callaghan and Bethany Shiner was published in March 2025

Felicitas Benziger's, The Right to Freedom of Thought under the European Convention on Human Rights was published in March 2025 in the Cambridge Handbook and is available open access

Talya Deibel's Private Law and the Inner Self: Comparative Perspectives on the Governance of Neurotechnology was published in the Global Journal of Comparative Law in August 2025

Dissemination of Research at Conferences and Workshops

Throughout 2024/2025, 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:

Hybrid Mind Conference, October 2024. Talya presented her work in the sixth body of jurisprudence at this conference hosted by the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Campus Biotech, Geneva on 17th October 2024. Talya's paper was entitled 'Private Law Ex Machina: Protection of Vulnerable Humans in the Age of Neurotechnology'.

Law and Memory Conference, November 2024. Patrick was invited by the Italian Association for Law and Literature (AIDEL) to present work stemming from the fifth and sixth bodies of jurisprudence at their annual conference at the University of Verona on 21st November 2024. Patrick's paper was entitled 'The Uses of Forgetting for Law and Policy'.

Conference on The Legal Distinction Between Persons and Things, July 2025. Talya presented a paper entitled 'Persona-Res Dichotomy, The Inner Self, and its Open Future' at this conference hosted by the University of Antwerp on 7th July 2025.

Knowledge Exchange Activities

Alongside our participation in academic conferences, we engaged in a range of different knowledge exchange activities, including:

Interactions with Key Stakeholders

The team continued its engagement with key stakeholders in 2024/2025. Amongst other activities, Patrick was invited to participate in two expert workshops on the right to freedom of thought bringing together academics, practitioners and members of the Advisory Committee to the UN Human Rights Council. The first workshop took place at the University of Oxford in January 2025 and the second was hosted by the Centre for Governance Innovation, Waterloo, Canada in March 2025.

Research-Led Teaching

Talya provided a guest lecture to the Human Rights in Private Law class at the University of Amsterdam in October 2024. Talya discussed the role of neurotechnologies in consumer and workplace contexts, exploring the real meaning of privacy and how law is reshaping our understanding of the 'inner self'.

Looking to the Year Ahead: Highlights

In the final year of our project, we aim to complete our centrepiece research output: our monograph on Law and the Inner Self.

We also have several papers that have either been accepted for publication or are currently under review. We will provide full details of these papers on our website when they are published.

We look forward to travelling to the Centre for Privacy Studies at the University of Copenhagen in September 2025 for a workshop on the theme of our project. Further details are available here.

A major event in the coming year will be our symposium on Law and the Inner Self, which is scheduled to take place in April 2026. At this symposium, we will present draft chapters of our monograph, each one presenting findings of one of the bodies of jurisprudence. Watch this space for more details!