The Law between Singularity and Equality

This post introduces a special series of posts based on contributions to a conference on ‘The Law between Singularity and Equality’ that took place in Berlin on 31 October/1 November 2025.

Equality is one of, if not the fundamental principle of law. Everyone is equal before the law and the law must treat equal cases equally and unequal cases unequally. However, the law must also do justice to each individual case. With advancing technical developments, particularly in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and big data, it will be possible in future to process each individual case with a much higher level of granularity. Does the ‘crisis of universality’ (Andreas Reckwitz) result in a crisis of equality before the law?

In the fall of 2025, we organised a conference in Berlin that looked at social developments and their repercussions in the law. It explored the question of whether the relationship between equality and singularity needs to be recalibrated in the data society. Some commentators argue that ‘personalised law’ will be the wave of the future. However, universality in law is not only a question of equality but also of freedom. If certain aspects remain unconsidered when applying a legal norm, this protects the privacy of the norm’s addressees.

In this respect, the metaphor of blind Iustitia refers both to equality before the law and to freedom through the law. It is therefore for good reasons that the law regulates a specific life situation in a certain dimension and not comprehensively. At the conference, we addressed these fundamental questions from an interdisciplinary perspective and included approaches from other disciplines such as sociology, economics, data science, and ethics.

The conference was divided into three sections. The first section dealt with equality as a legal principle, first from the doctrinal perspective of private and constitutional law, then from a comparative law and from an interdisciplinary perspective. The second section was devoted to current social challenges for equality, such as the Society of Singularities and the Metric Society. The concluding third section provided close-up case studies analysing equality issues in detail.

A documentation containing all contributions to the conference is available on SSRN. In addition a selection of the contributions has been included in a series of posts on the Oxford Business Law Blog:

1. Introduction to the Series ‘The Law Between Equality and Singularity’ (Christoph Busch & Alexander Hellgardt)
2. Personalized Consumer Vulnerability: A Critique (Catalina Goanta)
3. Equality as a General Principle of EU Civil Law (Vanessa Mak)
4. Tax Policy in a Society of Singularities (Johanna Stark)
5. AI Agents as Enablers of Personalized Law: Towards Agentic Disclosures? (Christoph Busch)
6. Ethical Perspectives on Personalized Law (Alexander Hellgardt)

The conference was a joint event of the research programmes ‘Regulatory Instruments in the Real World’ (Alexander Hellgardt, University of Augsburg) and ‘Granular Society – Granular Law?’ (Christoph Busch, University of Osnabrück) both funded by the Volkswagen Foundation under a Momentum Grant.

Readers can find the complete Law between Singularity and Equality series on the OBLB here.

Christoph Busch holds the Chair for European Private Law, European Business Law and Private International Law at the University of Osnabrück and is an Affiliated Fellow with the Information Society Project at Yale Law School.

Alexander Hellgardt holds the Chair of Private Law, Corporate Law and Jurisprudence at the University of Augsburg and is Research Affiliate at the Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance.