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ABSTRACT
This paper adopts a law and humanities-based methodology to critique the binary distinction between remembering and forgetting that often features in law and policy. Using the right to be forgotten as a case study, the paper argues that such a distinction conceals the many ways that remembering and forgetting are intrinsically connected. In particular, a binary distinction understands forgetting as not remembering. But forgetting can also take the form of enlightened remembering: a deliberate choice to think differently about the past, an attempt to remember it in more positive or constructive ways. Drawing on insights from Dante’s Divine Comedy, the paper pursues a normative argument about the value of enlightened remembering and then assesses the implications for legal discourse.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer for providing expert guidance and for suggesting the title of the paper. For their helpful comments on earlier drafts, I wish to thank Fiona Brimblecombe, Richard Mullender, Joe Purshouse and the participants at the Law & Humanities Roundtable on Time and Temporalities, hosted by David Gurnham and Gary Watt at the University of Southampton in July 2022.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Harald Weinrich, Lethe: The Art of and Critique of Forgetting (Steven Rendall tr, Cornell University Press 2004) 9.
2 Gunnthorunn Gudmundsdottir, Representations of Forgetting in Life Writing and Fiction (Palgrave MacMillan 2017) 7.
3 See Francesco Francioni (ed) Access to Justice as a Human Right (Oxford University Press 2007); Jeremy Waldron, ‘The Rule of Law and the Importance of Procedure’ (2011) 50 Nomos 3; Lawrence Byard Solum, ‘Procedural Justice’ (2004) 78 Southern California Law Review 181.
4 Cf Jerome Frank, Law and the Modern Mind (Coward-McCann 1949) x.
5 J. Schumann, ‘Precedents – A Question of Memory’ in Amalie Frese and Julius Schumann (eds), Precedents as Rules and Practice (Nomos 2021) 157.
6 Gerald J. Postema, Bentham and the Common Law Tradition (Clarendon Press 1986) 66. For Oliver Wendell Holmes, ‘[t]he law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life’. Oliver Wendell Holmes, ‘The Path of the Law’ (1997) 110(5) Harvard Law Review 991, 992.
7 Postema, ibid 63 quoting Blackstone (1 Comm. 442).
8 Gerald J. Postema, Legal Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: The Common Law World (Springer 2011) 445. On the similarities between Dworkin and the classical common law theorists, see Dan Priel, ‘Making Sense of Nonsense Jurisprudence’ (2020) Osgoode Legal Studies Research Paper, Available at SSRN: <https://ssrn.com/abstract=3696933> accessed 24 February 2023.
9 Peter Goodrich, Law in the Courts of Love: Literature and Other Minor Jurisprudences (Routledge 1996) 114.
10 Michael Schudson, Watergate and American Memory: How We Remember, Forget, and Reconstruct the Past (Basic Books 1992) 220 quoted in David Lowenthal (1993) ‘Memory and Oblivion’ (1993) 12(2) Museum Management and Curatorship 171, 171.
11 See, in this context, Timothy Schwarz, ‘Cases Time Forgot: Why Judges Can Sometimes Ignore Controlling Precedent’ (2007) 56(5) Emory Law Journal 1475.
12 Augustine, The Confessions of St Augustine (Edward Pusey tr, Dent 1970) 218.
13 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson trs, Blackwell 1978) 389.
14 See, for example, Marc Augé, Oblivion (Marjolijn de Jager tr, University of Minnesota Press 2004) 14 ff; Bradford Vivian, Public Forgetting: The Rhetoric and Politics of Beginning Again (Pennsylvania State University Press 2010); Christine Abbt, ‘Forgetting: In a Digital Glasshouse’ in Florent Thouvenin and others (eds), Remembering and Forgetting in the Digital Age (Springer 2018).
15 Bernard Schlink, Guilt about the Past (Beautiful Books 2010) 56.
16 The use of the term ‘space’ (or ‘breathing space’) in this paper is inspired by Julie Cohen’s work on privacy: Julie Cohen, Configuring the Networked Self (Yale University Press 2012) 149.
17 For influential scholarship arguing that not all forms of forgetting or forgetfulness should be understood in negative ways, see, inter alia, Jean-François Blanchette and Deborah Johnson, ‘Data Retention and the Panoptic Society: The Social Benefits of Forgetfulness’ (2002) 18 The Information Society 33; P. Connerton, ‘Seven Types of Forgetting’ (2008) 1(1) Memory Studies 59; Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Princeton University Press 2009); Aleida Assmann, Formen des Vergessens (Wallstein Verlag 2016); David Reiff, In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies (Yale University Press 2016).
18 The difference between interests in forgetting and being forgotten by others has been discussed in the literature. See, for instance, Antoinette Rouvroy’s paper, ‘Réinventer l’Art d’Oublier et de se Faire Oublier dans la Société de l’Information? Version augmentée’ as cited and further discussed in Bert-Jaap Koops, ‘Forgetting Footprints, Shunning Shadows. A Critical Analysis of the “Right to be Forgotten” in Big Data Practice’ (2011) 8(3) SCRIPTed 229 <http://script-ed.org/?p=43> accessed 24 February 2023. The importance of being able to forget in the digital environment was one of the underlying themes of Mayer-Schönberger’s book, Delete (n 17). Elsewhere, Mayer-Schönberger explains that this book ‘[argues] for forgetting not only because others may access my past, but because it can even be problematic when I access my own past’: Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, ‘Remembering (to) Delete: Forgetting Beyond Informational Privacy’ in Thouvenin and others (n 14) 119.
19 Cf. Weinrich on ‘enlightened forgetting’ (n 1) chapter 4.
20 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy (Robin Kirkpatrick tr, Penguin Books 2012).
21 Exceptions include: James Boyd White, ‘Free Speech and Valuable Speech: Silence, Dante, and the Marketplace of Ideas (2004) 51(3) UCLA Law Review 799; Justin Steinberg, Dante and the Limits of Law (University of Chicago Press 2013); David Gurnham, ‘Hell has no Flames, only Windows that won’t open’: Justice as Escape in Law and Literature’ (2019) 13(2) Law and Humanities 269; Diego Quaglioni, ‘The Law’ in Manuele Gragnolati, Elena Lombardi and Francesca Southerden (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Dante (Oxford University Press 2021).
22 Robin Kirkpatrick, ‘Introduction’ in Dante (n 20) xxxvii.
23 Manuele Gragnolati, Elena Lombardi and Francesca Southerden, ‘Introduction’, in Gragnolati, Lombardi and Southerden (eds), (n 21) xxxi.
24 Paul Ricœur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer tr, University of Chicago Press 2004) 452.
25 The amnesty, from the Greek amnēstia, meaning ‘forgetfulness’ has a long legal history. See, inter alia, Kaja Harter-Uibopuu and Fritz Mitthof, Vergeben und Vergessen? Amnestie in der Antike (Holzhausen 2013); Lowenthal ‘Memory and Oblivion’ (n 10); Ross Poole, ‘Enacting Oblivion’ (2009) 22 International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 149; Vivian, Public Forgetting (n 14) 43 ff.
26 Section 4 of the UK’s Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974, for instance, allows for certain categories of criminal conviction to become spent so that the ex-offender is not required to disclose details of the conviction, save in specific situations outlined in the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 (Exceptions) Order 1975.
27 In the laws of bankruptcy, we encounter references to ‘being forgotten’. In R (Balding) v Secretary of State for Work and Pensions [2007] EWHC 759 (Admin), Davis J at [48] discusses the policy ‘underpinning’ s 281 of the Insolvency Act (1986), which releases bankrupt persons from all of their debts. Davis J explains that the policy here is to ‘wipe the slate clean and, broadly speaking, enable the bankrupt to make a fresh start’.
28 Florent Thouvenin and others, ‘Part II Normative Concepts of Information Management’ in Thouvenin and others (eds), Remembering and Forgetting in the Digital Age (n 14).
29 Meg Leta Jones, Ctrl+Z: The Right to be Forgotten (New York University Press 2016).
30 Ibid 12 and 11.
31 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’ in Daniel Breazeale (ed), Untimely Meditations (Reginald John Hollingdale tr, Cambridge University Press 1997) 61.
32 Paul De Man, ‘Literary History and Literary Modernity’ (1970) 99(2) Daedalus 384, 388.
33 Nietzsche (n 31) 59.
34 Ibid.
35 Macbeth 5.3:39–46.
36 See Daniel Wegner and David Schneider ‘The White Bear Story’ (2003) 14(3/4) Psychological Inquiry 326. In the legal context, see Linda Demaine ‘In Search of an Anti-Elephant: Confronting the Human Inability to Forget Inadmissible Evidence’ (2008) 16(1) George Mason Law Review 99.
37 Of course, it is also true that particularly painful or traumatic memories may be repressed as Sigmund Freud famously discusses. This observation further demonstrates the complexity of the relationship between remembering and forgetting.
38 Goodrich (n 9) 127.
39 Cf. Weinrich on ‘enlightened forgetting’ (n 1) chapter 4.
40 Charles Taylor, The Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Harvard University Press 1989) 50–51, quoted by Miroslav Volf, The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World (Wm B Eerdmans Publishing Co 2006) 184.
41 Ibid.
42 Søren Kierkegaard, ‘Either/Or, A Fragment of Life’ in Howard Hong and Edna Hong (eds), The Essential Kierkegaard (Princeton University Press 2000) 56.
43 Assmann (n 17) 57–66.
44 Weinrich (n 1) 71 cites Kant’s Anthropologie (especially the section ‘Zum Gedächtnis’) and Kant’s essay ‘Über Pädagogik’.
45 O. Carter Snead ‘Memory and Punishment’ (2011) 64(4) Vanderbilt Law Review 1195.
46 For Margalit, forgiveness is both a voluntary decision or ‘policy’ to think differently about the past and a matter of ‘overcoming resentment and vengefulness, of mastering anger and humiliation’. See Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Harvard University Press 2002) 201–7. For Minnow, forgiveness is a ‘conscious, deliberate decision to forgo rightful grounds for grievance against those who have committed a wrong or harm’. See Martha Minnow, ‘Forgiveness, Law and Justice’ (2015) 103(6) California Law Review 1615, 1618.
47 Chris Hunt, ‘The Common Law’s Hodgepodge Protection of Privacy’ (2015) 66 University of New Brunswick Law Journal 161.
48 See, inter alia, Thomas Bennett and Daithí Mac Síthigh, The Campbell Legacy: Reflections on the Tort of Misuse of Private Information (Routledge 2017); Fiona Brimblecombe and Helen Fenwick, ‘Keeping Control of Personal Information in the Digital Age: Efficacy and Equivalence of Tortious and GDPR/DPA Relief?’ (2022) 13 Law Quarterly Review 456.
49 For an excellent analysis and attempt to find coherence in various essentialist definitions, see Bert-Jaap Koops and Maša Galič, ‘Unite in Privacy Diversity: A Kaleidoscopic View of Privacy Definitions’ (2021) 73(2) South Carolina Law Review 465.
50 Jeffrey Reiman, ‘Privacy, Intimacy, and Personhood’ (1976) 6(1) Philosophy & Public Affairs 26, 39.
51 Consider in this context Fichte and Hegel on ‘recognition’ (Anerkennung). See generally Robert Williams, Recognition: Fichte and Hegel on the Other (SUNY Press 1992).
52 Julie Cohen, ‘Surveillance versus Privacy: Effects and Implications’ in David Gray and Stephen Henderson (eds), The Cambridge Handbook of Surveillance Law (Cambridge University Press 2017) 458.
53 Jeffrey Reiman, ‘Driving to the Panopticon: A Philosophical Exploration of the Risks to Privacy Posed by the Highway Technology of the Future’ (1995) 11(1) Santa Clara High Technology Law Journal 27, 30.
54 For scholarship that pays close attention to the ‘forgetting’ aspect of the right to be forgotten, see, inter alia, Paulan Korenhof, ‘Forgetting Bits and Pieces: An Exploration of the “Right to be Forgotten” as Implementation of “Forgetting” in Online Memory Processes’ (2013) TILT Law & Technology Working Paper No. 4/2013 <https://ssrn.com/abstract=2326475> accessed 27 February 2023; Patrick O’Callaghan and Sylvia De Mars, ‘Narratives about Privacy and Forgetting in English Law’ (2016) 30(1–2) International Review of Law Computers and Technology 42.
55 Case C-131/12 Google Spain SL and Google Inc. v Agencia Española de Protección de Datos (AEPD) and Mario Costeja González (13 May 2014). Sometimes known as the ‘right to be delisted’ or the ‘right to be deindexed’, the ‘right to request delisting’ is perhaps a more accurate way to describe the right in question. The European Data Protection Board uses this terminology. See Guidelines 5/2019 on the criteria of the Right to be Forgotten in the search engines cases under the GDPR (part 1) <https://edpb.europa.eu/our-work-tools/our-documents/guidelines/guidelines-52019-criteria-right-be-forgotten-search-engines_en> accessed 27 February 2023.
56 The grounds are set out in Article 17(1). The exceptions are set out in Article 17(3).
57 Cf. Article 17(2) GDPR.
58 On this point, see Mayer-Schönberger (n 17) 123 ff. See also Google Spain (n 55) [80].
59 Specifically, Article 12 (right to rectification/erasure) and Article 14 (right to object).
60 Google Spain (n 55) [94].
61 Paul Ohm, ‘Good enough Privacy’ (2008) University of Chicago Legal Forum: Article 2 <https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol2008/iss1/2/> accessed 27 February 2023.
62 It is now accepted that Article 17 GDPR provides a legal basis for the right to request delisting. Article 21 (the right to object) provides an additional legal basis. See EDPB Guidelines 5/19 (n 55), 4–5.
63 Briscoe v Reader's Digest Association, 4 Cal. 3d 529, 539, 93 Cal. Rptr. 866, 873 (1971).
64 On the Kantian idea of dignity as treating each person as ‘a full member of the human community’, see Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd 1977) 198. ‘Normative agency’, as Griffin understands it, is ‘our capacity to choose and to pursue our conception of a worthwhile life’: James Griffin, On Human Rights (Oxford University Press 2008) 44. On ‘self-definition’ and ‘self-discovery’, see Beate Roessler, The Value of Privacy (Policy Press 2005) 146.
65 Previous scholarship has explored the theme of forgetting as it is developed in the Commedia. See, for example, Weinrich (n 1) 24–38; Volf (n 40) 135–51; 175–76; Kevin Grove, ‘Becoming True in the Purgatorio: Dante on Forgetting, Remembering and Learning to Speak’ in Leonard DeLorenzo and Vittorio Montemaggi (eds), Dante, Mercy, and the Beauty of the Human Person (Cascade Books 2017).
66 Dante wrote this work in exile, having been forced out of his native Florence.
67 Inferno 1:3 in Dante (n 20).
68 Kirkpatrick, ‘Introduction’ ibid.
69 Ibid xxvii.
70 Ibid, Inferno 3:1–9.
71 Dante Alighieri, The Inferno (John Ciardi tr, Signet 1954), Canto 3:9. There is some uncertainty as to who first used this form of words in the English translation. A search of Google Books reveals an 1814 translation by the Rev. H.F. Cary who writes ‘All hope abandon, ye who enter here’. See The Vision, or, Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, of Dante Alighieri (Taylor & Hessey 1814).
72 On this point, see David Davies, ‘Lecture on Purgatorio Canto 12’, Baylor’s Honor College 100 Days of Dante Course (2021–2022) <https://100daysofdante.com/canto-videos-listing/> accessed 27 February 2023; Vittorio Montemaggi, Reading Dante’s Commedia as Theology (Oxford University Press 2016) 211–12.
73 Ombre, generally translated as ‘shades’, is the term used by Dante to refer to the beings in Inferno and Purgatorio.
74 David Davies, ‘Lecture on Purgatorio Canto 12’, Baylor’s Honor College 100 Days of Dante Course (n 72).
75 Rachel Teubner, ‘Lecture on Inferno Canto 14’, ibid; Teolinda Barolini, ‘Inferno 14: Sunt lacrimae rerum’ in Commento Baroliniano, Digital Dante (New York: Columbia University Libraries, 2018) <https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/dante/divine-comedy/inferno/inferno-14/> accessed 27 February 2023.
76 Barolini, ‘Inferno 14’, ibid at [17].
77 Ibid at [18]–[20].
78 Brian Williams, ‘Lecture on Inferno Canto 34’, Baylor’s Honor College 100 Days of Dante Course (n 72).
79 Kirkpatrick, ‘Introduction’ (n 20) xxx.
80 David Davies, ‘Lecture on Purgatorio Canto 12’, Baylor’s Honor College 100 Days of Dante Course (n 72).
81 For example, as Kim explains, the contrapasso of the lustful, who ‘allowed their passion to overwhelm their rationality’ when alive, is to be flung around in a whirlwind for the rest of eternity. See Jane Kim, ‘Lecture on Inferno Canto 5’, ibid. See also Weinrich (n 1) 36.
82 Dante (n 20), Inferno 5: 121–23.
83 Brendan Case, ‘Lecture on Inferno Canto 26’ in Baylor’s Honor College 100 Days of Dante Course (n 72). For Case, TS Eliot’s line ‘offers a lovely one-line summary of the Inferno’s plot’.
84 Brian Williams, ‘Lecture on Purgatorio Canto 17’, ibid.
85 Grove (n 65) 55–59.
86 Purgatorio 28:128 in Dante (n 20).
87 Kirkpatrick, ‘Notes to Purgatorio’ in Dante (ibid) 591.
88 Ibid, Purgatorio 18:129.
89 Ibid, Purgatorio 27:142.
90 As Montemaggi explains: ‘Following immersion in Lethe and Eünoè what changes is not what one remembers but the way in which one remembers it’. Montemaggi (n 72) 171. See also Grove (n 65) 61–63.
91 Purgatorio 33: 142–45 in Dante (n 20).
92 Consider, in this context, Gurnham’s analysis of metaphors of physical encumbrance and escape as they find expression in law. See Gurnham (n 21).
93 Consider, for example, Inferno 23, where shades are wearing robes of lead.
94 Barolini (n 75).
95 ‘Only by forgetting’, as Gadamer puts it, ‘does the mind have the possibility of total renewal, the capacity to see everything with fresh eyes, so that what is long familiar fuses with the new into a many leveled unity’. Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall trs, Bloomsbury 2013) 15.
96 Kirkpatrick (n 20) xxxvii.
97 On this point, see Volf (n 40) 138.
98 DeLorenzo and Montemaggi (n 65) x.
99 Boyd White (n 21) 807.
100 See also Volf (n 40) 83 on the effects of ‘truthfully remember[ing] a wrong suffered’, the memory of which ‘we have integrated … into our life story … ’.
101 Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late-Modern Age (Polity Press 1991) 54.
102 Paul Ricœur, ‘Imagination, Testimony and Trust: A Dialogue with Paul Ricouer’ in Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley (eds), Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy (Routledge 1998) 14 quoted in Garrett Sullivan, Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama (Cambridge University Press 2005) 132.
103 Scholars have invoked the idea of a ‘right to forget’ in different contexts ranging from neuroethics to urban studies. See, for example: Jason Hill, Becoming a Cosmopolitan: What it Means to be a Human in the New Millennium (Rowman & Littlefield 2000) 4; Christoph Bublitz and Martin Dresler, ‘A Duty to Remember, a Right to Forget? Memory Manipulations and the Law’ in Jens Clausen and Neil Levy (eds), Handbook of Neuroethics (Springer 2015); Antoon De Baets, ‘A Historian’s View on the Right to be Forgotten’ (2016) 30(1–2) International Review of Law, Computers & Technology 57, 58; Miroslaw Sadowski, ‘City as a Locus of Collective Memory: Streets, Monuments and Human Rights’ (2020) 40(1–2) Zeitschrift für Rechtssoziologie 209, 231.
104 Milan Kundera, Ignorance (Linda Asher tr, Faber & Faber 2002) 123.
105 Ibid.
106 Here the paper follows Dworkin’s account of human dignity, as elaborated by Guest: it ‘consists of two principles: a right to respect as an equal and a right to ethical independence’. See Stephen Guest, Ronald Dworkin (3rd edn, Stanford University Press 2013) 11.
107 Mayer-Schönberger (n 17) 123.
108 Ricœur (n 24) 442.
109 Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (Aaron Asher tr, Faber & Faber 1982) 3.
110 On memory sanctions, see Harriet Flower, The Art of Forgetting: Disgrace, and Oblivion in Roman Political Culture (University of North Carolina Press 2006). For more recent examples, see Antoon de Baets, ‘The Year Zero: Iconoclastic Breaks with the Past’ (2014) 13 Annales Universitatis Paedagogicae Cracoviensis. Studia Politologica 3; Carter Snead (n 45) 1238–39. We even find examples of memory laws with this tendency in modern democratic systems. Gutman and Tirosh provide examples of attempts at ‘forced forgetting’ in Israel. See Yifat Gutman and Noam Tirosh ‘Balancing Atrocities and Forced Forgetting: Memory Laws as a Means of Social Control in Israel’ (2021) 46(3) Law & Social Inquiry 705.
111 See generally Roman David, ‘What We Know About Transitional Justice: Survey and Experimental Evidence’ (2017) 38(S1) Political Psychology 151.
112 See Margalit (n 46); Minnow (n 46); Martha Minnow, When Should Law Forgive? (W. W. Norton & Company 2019); Ricœur, Memory, History, Forgetting (n 24); Schlink (n 15). For an interesting discussion about the relationship between forgiveness and forgetting in the context of the right to be forgotten, see Jones (n 29) 12–21.
113 Cf. Umberto Eco, ‘An Ars Oblivionalis? Forget It!’ (1988) 103(3) Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 254.