The Book · Chapter 16 of 28

Chapter 16The Constitutional Community and the Legal Subject

Which protections attach to the person before an adverse decision, including at the stages of identification, classification and exclusion?

Summary

Computational administration can determine a person's practical standing before it issues any formal decision. This chapter asks what legal subjecthood requires when institutions encounter people through identifiers, records, classifications and predicted risks. Its Legal-Subject Principle connects recognition, rights, responsibility and remedy across the entire administrative process. The chapter develops the Digital Person as the human being's institutional representation, examining replication, context and control without conferring personhood on software. Comparative authorities on identity, credit scoring, facial recognition and risk assessment inform arguments for pre-decisional protection, intelligible reasons, participation, accommodation and correction across dependent systems. An additional inquiry derives nine proposed entitlements and keeps constitutional amendment and interpretation of existing rights in parallel. The framework presents an organising argument rather than a universal statement of existing law: enforceable protections require jurisdictional anchors, proportionate procedures and institutions capable of honouring them.

• legal subjecthood
• pre-decisional protection
• Digital Person
• identity and recognition
• fact and prediction
• propagation of correction
• cognitive autonomy
• collective remedy
• constitutional rights