You are cordially invited to the seminar organised by Bilkent University Faculty of Law.
“The Post-Mortem Protection of Personality Rights”
Asst. Prof. Dr. Gizem Arslan
Kadir Has University Faculty of Law
23 May 2025, Friday – 15:00
Art Gallery, Main Campus Library
The post-mortem protection of personality rights has increasingly gained attention in contemporary legal discussions, particularly in light of the challenges posed by the digital age. While it has traditionally been accepted that personality ends with the death of the right holder, the continued protection of certain personality interests such as privacy, dignity, and honour after death has become a subject of increasing debate. The widespread use of digital technologies has led to the persistence of digital identities beyond a person’s lifetime, significantly increasing the risk of posthumous violations of these interests. The seminar will focus on the normative justifications put forward for the post-mortem protection of certain personality interests and examine how different legal systems approach this evolving issue.
Gizem Arslan earned her law degree from Istanbul University and completed her master’s studies in International Trade Law and European Union at Istanbul Commerce University. She received her PhD in Private Law from Istanbul University with a dissertation entitled “Strict Liability for Abnormally Dangerous Activities in American Tort Law Compared with Turkish Law.” During her doctoral studies, she conducted research as a visiting scholar at St. Mary’s University in Texas and as a visiting researcher at Harvard University in the United States. Since 2022, she has been a faculty member at the Faculty of Law, Kadir Has University, where she teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses in Civil Law. Her main research areas include the law of persons, tort law, contract law, and climate change law. Her current research primarily focuses on post-mortem personality rights, and she conducted comparative legal research on this topic at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg. She is also the coordinator of a TÜBİTAK-funded project on climate change and serves as a co-investigator on a project concerning digital personality and digital inheritance in the information society.