The Precision Benefit
This chapter offers the basic justification for personalized law: the precision benefit. Personalized rules could accomplish the underlying goals of any law more effectively. Any goals, of any law. The reason is almost trivial: personalized law accounts for more relevant circumstances and differences in tailoring individual commands. This is the same reason that custom-made shoes fit better than single size, or that medicine based on personalized diagnostics cures better than one-size-fits-all treatments. Uniform rules and commands, even if optimal on average, are a poor fit for people with diverse preferences, characteristics, histories, and means. The chapter begins by demonstrating the value of personalization in other sectors of human activity, like medicine and education, and then uses an example of data protection law to display the benefits of personalized rules. It also discusses the production costs of personalized law, primarily the costs associated with the use of more information in the promulgation of legal commands.