Personalized Regulatory Techniques
This chapter expands the demonstration how personalized law would transform existing legal institutions. The chapter shifts the focus from specific doctrines to regulatory techniques. These are generic approaches to the design of legal interventions, used in every area of law. The chapter examines the personalization of several techniques: default rules, mandated disclosures, compensatory damages, and bundles of rights. With each of these tools, the law presently prescribes one size fits all rules, designed to either best fit the average person, or to promote the interests of a specific subgroup of the population. By shifting to personalized rules, the law could simultaneously advance the interests of different groups and individuals. The chapter shows that designing personalized default rules, disclosures, damages, or bundles of rights would promote the goals underlying these interventions. Personalized default would mimic peoples' preferences more successfully and reduce the incidence of opt out. Personalized disclosures stand a chance of being more useful to people. Personalized compensation would come closer to making victims of wrongs whole. And personalized bundles of rights would recognize the diversity of people's interests and aspirations.