Thinking of data protection law's subject matter as a complex adaptive system: A heuristic display

According to both whistle blowers and public reports, some commercial and governmental practices concerning personal data do not even appear to notice the law as a regulatory force. We are not satisfied by what mainstream legal scholarship has on offer in this context. Positivists consider the issue outside their domain. Realists (including their critical branch) focus on the behavior of legal institutions, ignoring many of the diverse institutions that have regulatory force. We need an additional, complementary perspective to help us, legal scholars, earn and hold serious positions in the diverse disciplinary teams that we need to participate in, in order to adequately investigate (and inform on) persistent problems concerning personal-data protection as faced by legislators.In this article we investigate whether the subject matter of data protection law, identified as Personal Data Community (hereinafter PDC), can be treated as a complex adaptive system (hereinafter CAS). This proposition is premised on the argument that the PDC exhibits key traits of CAS, including systemic, dynamic and complex characteristics. And we further show how complexity theory can help legal scholarship (without losing its identity) to join and add value to diverse disciplinary research and advisory teams. In this article, we aim for a stepping-stone (establishing that data protection law addresses a complex adaptive system with all of its corollaries), rather than for final solutions.