Contemporary data protection law has largely conceptualised privacy as a bundle of subjective rights, enforceable through consent mechanisms, breach notification obligations, and supervisory authority sanctions. This framing, while practically important, obscures the deeper architectural structure of legal relations that governs the digital privacy domain. The present article argues that Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld's analytical jurisprudence — and specifically the immunity-disability correlative — provides a more precise and theoretically coherent vocabulary for understanding how constitutional and statutory privacy protections insulate data subjects from the legal power of both state and corporate actors. Drawing on doctrinal legal research, comparative constitutional analysis, and interpretive jurisprudential inquiry, the article reconstructs the major instruments of digital privacy law — the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation, constitutional privacy doctrines in India, the United States, and Germany, and emerging platform regulatory frameworks — through the lens of Hohfeldian legal relations. The central finding is that constitutional privacy protections are most accurately characterised as immunities structurally disabling state and corporate actors from altering the data subject's protected legal position without satisfying constitutionally mandated conditions. This reconceptualisation has significant implications for judicial reasoning, regulatory design, and the normative theory of informational self-determination in surveillance-intensive digital environments.
Hohfeldian jurisprudence; immunity-disability; digital privacy; data protection law; informational self-determination; constitutional rights; platform regulation
Soumyadip Panda, Dr. Rupak Kr. Joshi. The Immunity-Disability Architecture of Digital Privacy: Reimagining Data Protection Rights Through Hohfeld's Analytical Framework. Indian Journal of Modern Research and Reviews. 2026; 4(7):183-192
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