In recent years, scholars have devoted increasing attention to the prospect of personalized law. The bulk of the literature has so far concerned whether to personalize any law and, if so, what substantive changes should be instantiated through personalization. Comparatively little discussion has gone to the authorship of personalized laws. Who will make personalized laws? Who will enforce them? In this Essay, I propose we consider the who in the personalization debate. Specifically, I identify the policy considerations that bear on the optimal maker or enforcer of personalized law. To put it another way, my Essay begins where most of the prior literature leaves off: having concluded that personalized law has some merit in a given area, I ask when the state should facilitate personalized lawmaking by nonstate actors. While there are many threads in the discussion, one theme emerges: the move to personalized law is often best taken by private lawmakers. Thus, as both a descriptive and normative matter, a future that makes the best use of personalized law should involve a diminished role for state directives. The University of Chicago Law Review [86:551 what substantive changes should be instantiated through personalization. 2 Comparatively little discussion has gone to the authorship of personalized laws. Who will make personalized laws? 3 Who will enforce them? 4 The little attention directed to this question has assumed a somewhat conventional public/private dichotomy. Some papers have focused on ways in which the state could personalize its directives to citizens. 5 Other work has focused on how personalization might help contracting parties better vindicate their objectives. 6 In these latter papers, the only question for the 2 See, for example, Adi Libson and Gideon Parchomovsky, Toward the Personalization of Copyright Law, 86 U Chi L Rev 527, 542-46 (2019) (suggesting ways to personalize copyright law based on personalized consumption data); Christoph Busch, Implementing Personalized Law: Personalized Disclosures in Consumer Law and Data Privacy Law, 86 U Chi L Rev 309, 324-30 (2019) (suggesting potential elements for a personalized regulatory design for consumer law and data privacy law). 3 Within this Symposium, an exception is Professor Lee Fennell's contribution, which considers the possibility of self-authored law.
