Law Commons^™

Searching Secrets, Nita A. Farahany

Faculty Scholarship

A Fourth Amendment violation has traditionally involved a physical intrusion such as the search of a house or the seizure of a person or her papers. Today, investigators rarely need to break down doors, rummage through drawers, or invade one’s peace and repose to obtain incriminating evidence in an investigation. Instead, the government may unobtrusively intercept information from electronic files, GPS transmissions, and intangible communications. In the near future, it may even be possible to intercept information directly from suspects’ brains. Courts and scholars have analogized modern searches for information to searches of tangible property like containers and have treated …

When Copyright Law And Science Collide: Empowering Digitally Integrated Research Methods On A Global Scale, Jerome H. Reichman, Ruth L. Okediji

Faculty Scholarship

Automated knowledge discovery tools have become central to the scientific enterprise in a growing number of fields and are widely employed in the humanities as well. New scientific methods, and the evolution of entirely new fields of scientific inquiry, have emerged from the integration of digital technologies into scientific research processes that ingest vast amounts of published data and literature. The Article demonstrates that intellectual property laws have not kept pace with these phenomena.

Copyright law and science co-existed for much of their respective histories, with a benign tradition of the former giving way to the needs of the latter. …

Privacy And Law Enforcement In The European Union: The Data Retention Directive, Francesca Bignami

Faculty Scholarship

This paper examines a recent twist in EU data protection law. In the 1990s, the European Union was still primarily a market-creating organization and data protection in the European Union was aimed at rights abuses by market actors. Since the terrorist attacks of New York, Madrid, and London, however, cooperation on fighting crime has accelerated. Now, the challenge for the European Union is to protect privacy in its emerging system of criminal justice. This paper analyzes the first EU law to address data privacy in crime-fighting—the Data Retention Directive. Based on a detailed examination of the Directive’s legislative history, the …

Reining In The Data Traders: A Tort For The Misuse Of Personal Information, Sarah Ludington

Faculty Scholarship

In 2005, three spectacular data security breaches focused public attention on the vast databases of personal information held by data traders such as ChoicePoint and LexisNexis, and the vulnerability of that data. The personal information of hundreds of thousands of people had either been hacked or sold to identity thieves, yet the data traders refused to reveal to those people the specifics of the information sold or stolen. While Congress and many state legislatures swiftly introduced bills to force data traders to be more accountable to their data subjects, fewer states actually enacted laws, and none of the federal bills …

Cruel, Mean, Or Lavish? Economic Analysis, Price Discrimination And Digital Intellectual Property, James Boyle

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.