Personalization and Distributive Justice

This chapter examines how equality in the eyes of the law would survive if legal commands are personalized and result in different rules for different people. It argues that nothing in the framework of personalized law violates equality before the law. On the contrary, personalized treatment provides tools to distribute rights and burdens in a manner that conforms to egalitarian views and to notions of desert and need. If desert and need are determined by relevant attributes in a proportional manner, a just system should treat people differently. The chapter examines how personalized law, when designed to promote goals other than equality, could be bolstered (or constrained) by various notions of distributive justice. It recognizes that the use of Big Data and artificial intelligence could itself be a source of injustice, perpetuating historical biases. The chapter discusses ways to resolve this concern. Finally, it compares the deliberate differentiation of commands under personalized law with unintended forms of differential treatment pervasive under uniform laws. It concludes that the use of a multitude of relevant factors to personalize commands, derived from transparent statistical methods, offers novel opportunities to promote distributive justice goals under the law.