Private Selves – An Analysis of Legal Individualism

Abstract

This chapter analyses legal personhood in the European legal setting. EU law used to be primarily concerned with economic integration and free movement but now due to the growing importance of human rights and the creation of EU citizenship, people are gradually taking centre stage in Union law. There is increasing need for enquiries into the European legal person. The chapter takes privacy and personal data protection as exemplary areas of law where the EU is currently engaged in defining personhood. The discussion in this chapter is structured around a tension between individuality and commonality. Individualism sees man as primarily an individual, a person with rights, or a unique autonomous agent. This chapter tries to consider legal subjectivity without a necessary connection to individuality. Privacy and personal data regulation are fields of law where it is possible to recognise tendencies of modern legal thought to emphasise unique persons and individuals’ rights. The chapter argues that the increasing protection of the rights to privacy and personal data need to be balanced with an understanding of legal personhood as embedded in community. Privacy and personal data protection can be understood as instances of immunisation following ideas developed by Roberto Esposito. Taken too far, the logic of immunisation undermines community and shared, collective meanings. The reading of Esposito put forward here sees a possibility of escaping some individualistic tendencies of the law by reconfiguring the legal person as a third. The idea of the third person can lead towards conceptions of legal personhood as embedded in society.