205Abstract

Keeping pace with the advances in bioinformatics and digitalisation has become one of the central tasks of today’s legal system and its respective sub-areas. However, this will no longer be possible in the future without moving away from the ideal of a technology-free human individual as the only possible legal subject. Supreme Court case law recognises this necessity when it extends the boundaries of the human body beyond its ‘skin and skullcap’ and searches for ‘functional units’ of people and things in the world. Within the law, this can lead to legal subjectivity no longer being attributed exclusively to flesh-and-blood humans, but possibly also to non-human beings that have combined with them to form a single entity. Since the European Virtual Human Twins Initiative was launched by the European Commission in December 2023 to support the development and implementation of solutions for virtual human twins in the health and care sector, the protection of the human body has also shifted beyond the analogue world into a digital world. Legal protection concepts for digital body data that are analogous to ownership will no longer help people in the foreseeable future. Effective protection of the legal subject ‘human being’ in its entirety, ie including its technical self-extensions and images, is only possible by turning away from the traditional subject-object dualism and can only be found in a ‘deanthropocentric legal subjectivity’. This involves renegotiating who or what can, and should, have the status of a legal subject under changed social conditions. The task of a technologically-enlightened law is to identify the new ‘legal subject candidates’ and examine their personification potential. Although the present treatise examines the phenomenon of bodily externalisations based on German tort law, the developed theses are universally applicable to other legal systems.

206In the words of Rudolf Wiethölter, ‘work on the paradigm, not in the paradigm’.¹