A Right to Be Left Dead

Technology forces us to contemplate a counterpart to the right of privacy—Brandeis and Warren’s “right to be let alone”—for the age of artificial intelligence: the right to be left dead. Traditionally, it has been presumed that even if Brandeis and Warren’s right constitutes “the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men,” it does not apply to the dead. The question is whether we need a new approach at a time when technology can reanimate anyone and make them behave in a manner indistinguishable from their living presence. This Article interrogates the need for a right to be left dead and takes some preliminary steps towards defining its contours, chief among them an awareness that an individual right to prevent unauthorized reanimations of the dead must look very different than the existing privacy, consumer protection, and property laws marshalled against unauthorized invocations of the living. A new right to be left dead can serve important social goals, but it must be narrowly construed, yielding to the critical interests of the living when necessary. To the extent legislatures and courts are beginning to grapple with the nascent problem of digital reanimation, they have failed to account for the most fundamental dividing line in existence—the line between life and death.