Legal Adaptation to the Internet: The Emergence of Digital Rights and Internet Personhood

Understanding how the law has adapted to technological change in the past is critical to determining how it can best respond in the future. In attempting to do so, scholars have largely examined legal adaptation to technological change only with respect to discrete doctrinal categories. While useful, these analyses may fail to grasp the underlying human interests affected by a technology in their focus on specific areas of law. This thesis demonstrates that a holistic examination of past legal adaptations to a technology across multiple doctrinal categories helps to elucidate the underlying interests affected by a technology, and better assists in addressing challenges created by similar technologies in the future. This thesis develops a substantive theory of legal adaptation to the Internet, finding that much of the lawâ s response to the Internet recognizes the personhood-expanding nature of Internet use, specifically with respect to privacy, anonymity, and freedom of expression.LL.M