Prof. Ingrid Lindqvist, LLD

A three-volume doctrinal history tracing the constitutional and doctrinal antecedents of contemporary data protection rights across five European jurisdictions from 1945 to the present.

Contemporary data protection scholarship largely treats the field as a modern statutory creation, with limited attention to the constitutional doctrines from which its central concepts were derived. This obscures both the internal logic of the jurisprudence and the reasons for its divergence from other traditions.

Archival doctrinal research across five national jurisdictions, including constitutional court records, legislative preparatory materials and professional-body archives, supplemented by comparative analysis of 340 decisions.

The study establishes that continental data protection doctrine derives principally from dignitary rather than proprietary foundations, that this derivation was largely unarticulated at the time, and that several persistent doctrinal tensions in current jurisprudence follow directly from the incompleteness of that assembly.

The work provides the first sustained constitutional history of the field and reframes the European–American divergence as a difference in doctrinal inheritance rather than policy preference.