Law Commons^™

The Sky Is The Limit: Regulating The Next Generation Of Privacy Invasion, Laura Patty

GGU Law Review Blog

No abstract provided.

Intellectual Property And Public Health – A White Paper, Ryan G. Vacca, Jim Chen, Jay Dratler Jr., Tom Folsom, Timothy Hall, Yaniv Heled, Frank Pasquale, Elizabeth Reilly, Jeff Samuels, Kathy Strandburg, Kara Swanson, Andrew Torrance, Katharine Van Tassel

Akron Law Faculty Publications

On October 26, 2012, the University of Akron School of Law’s Center for Intellectual Property and Technology hosted its Sixth Annual IP Scholars Forum. In attendance were thirteen legal scholars with expertise and an interest in IP and public health who met to discuss problems and potential solutions at the intersection of these fields. This report summarizes this discussion by describing the problems raised, areas of agreement and disagreement between the participants, suggestions and solutions made by participants and the subsequent evaluations of these suggestions and solutions.

Led by the moderator, participants at the Forum focused generally on three broad …

15th Annual Open Government Summit: Access To Public Records Act & Open Meetings Act, 2013, Department Of Attorney General, State Of Rhode Island

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Fighting Cyber-Crime After United States V. Jones, Danielle K. Citron, David Gray, Liz Rinehart

Faculty Scholarship

In a landmark non-decision last term, five Justices of the United States Supreme Court would have held that citizens possess a Fourth Amendment right to expect that certain quantities of information about them will remain private, even if they have no such expectations with respect to any of the information or data constituting that whole. This quantitative approach to evaluating and protecting Fourth Amendment rights is certainly novel and raises serious conceptual, doctrinal, and practical challenges. In other works, we have met these challenges by engaging in a careful analysis of this “mosaic theory” and by proposing that courts focus …

Order, Technology And The Constitutional Meanings Of Criminal Procedure, Thomas P. Crocker

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

What Privacy Is For, Julie E. Cohen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Privacy has an image problem. Over and over again, regardless of the forum in which it is debated, it is cast as old-fashioned at best and downright harmful at worst — anti-progressive, overly costly, and inimical to the welfare of the body politic. Yet the perception of privacy as antiquated and socially retrograde is wrong. It is the result of a conceptual inversion that relates to the way in which the purpose of privacy has been conceived. Like the broader tradition of liberal political theory within which it is situated, legal scholarship has conceptualized privacy as a form of protection …

Privacy Laws And Privacy Levers: Online Surveillance Versus Economic Development In The People's Republic Of China, Ann Bartow

Law Faculty Scholarship

This essay describes and contextualizes the ongoing efforts by the Communist Party of China (CPC) to reconcile two dramatically competing interests: the desire to extensively monitor the communications of its citizenry, and a burning ambition to further develop its banking and financial industries, its high tech innovation capabilities, and its overall share of the “knowledge economy.” Monitoring and censoring communications, especially via “one to many” social networking platforms, is viewed as essential for the prevention of mass anti-Party political activities ranging from peaceful civil disobedience to armed insurrection and for the protection of the reputations of individual Party leaders. Mobile …

Striking A Balance Between Privacy And Online Commerce, Mark Bartholomew

Journal Articles

It is becoming commonplace to note that privacy and online commerce are on a collision course. Corporate entities archive and monetize more and more personal information. Citizens increasingly resent the intrusive nature of such data collection and use. Just noticing this conflict, however, tells us little. In "Informing and Reforming the Marketplace of Ideas: The Public-Private Model for Data Production and the First Amendment" Professor Shubha Ghosh not only notes the tension between the costs and benefits of data commercialization, but suggests three normative perspectives for balancing privacy and commercial speech. This is valuable because without a rich theoretical framework …

The New American Privacy, Richard J. Peltz-Steele

Faculty Publications

Conventional wisdom paints U.S. and European approaches to privacy at irreconcilable odds. But that portrayal overlooks a more nuanced reality of privacy in American law. The free speech imperative of U.S. constitutional law since the civil rights movement shows signs of tarnish. And in areas of law that have escaped constitutionalization, such as fair-use copyright and the freedom of information, developing personality norms resemble European-style balancing. Recent academic and political initiatives on privacy in the United States emphasize subject control and contextual analysis, reflecting popular thinking not so different after all from that which animates Europe’s 1995 directive and 2012 …

Guest View: In Defense Of Student Privacy, Richard J. Peltz-Steele

Faculty Publications

Privacy is another American value we rush to sacrifice on the altar of accountability. In Ohio, reporters swarm the yards of liberated kidnapping victims. And in Massachusetts, news trucks besiege the campus at UMass Dartmouth, where I work, and where marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was a student. Media want to know everything about Tsarnaev and his college friends. The university, bound by federal privacy law, has refused access to student academic and financial aid records.

Eyes In The Sky: Constitutional And Regulatory Approaches To Domestic Drone Deployment, Hillary B. Farber

Faculty Publications

This article begins with a current look at the deployment of drones domestically, both in terms of their use and the procedure for attaining approval for flight. Part II examines the capabilities of drones. Part III considers the Supreme Court's current Fourth Amendment jurisprudence and its application to law enforcement's use of drones. Part IV reviews existing and proposed federal and state regulation of drones. Part V offers constitutional and legislative prescriptions for regulating drones.

Addressing The Harm Of Total Surveillance: A Reply To Professor Neil Richards, Danielle Keats Citron, David C. Gray

Faculty Scholarship

In his insightful article The Dangers of Surveillance, 126 HARV. L. REV. 1934 (2013), Neil Richards offers a framework for evaluating the implications of government surveillance programs that is centered on protecting "intellectual privacy." Although we share his interest in recognizing and protecting privacy as a condition of personal and intellectual development, we worry in this essay that, as an organizing principle for policy, "intellectual privacy" is too narrow and politically fraught. Drawing on other work, we therefore recommend that judges, legislators, and executives focus instead on limiting the potential of surveillance technologies to effect programs of broad and indiscriminate …

A Shattered Looking Glass: The Pitfalls And Potential Of The Mosaic Theory Of Fourth Amendment Privacy, David C. Gray, Danielle Keats Citron

Faculty Scholarship

On January 23, 2012, the Supreme Court issued a landmark non-decision in United States v. Jones. In that case, officers used a GPS-enabled device to track a suspect’s public movements for four weeks, amassing a considerable amount of data in the process. Although ultimately resolved on narrow grounds, five Justices joined concurring opinions in Jones expressing sympathy for some version of the “mosaic theory” of Fourth Amendment privacy. This theory holds that we maintain reasonable expectations of privacy in certain quantities of information even if we do not have such expectations in the constituent parts. This Article examines and …

Privacy, Antitrust, And Power, Frank Pasquale

Faculty Scholarship

When a dominant internet service collects information about its users, the situation is so far from the usual arm’s-length market transaction that neoclassical economic analysis is misleading. “Lack of surveillance” is not a product that individuals have varying preferences for and purchase accordingly. Rather, surveillance is an inevitable concomitant of life online. We need to tame the power that surveillance entails, rather than continuing to pursue illusory, surveillance-free alternatives on the platform level.

To the extent a company creates profiles of individuals and collects data on them, a third party ought to be collecting reports from the company on how …

A Fourth Amendment Theory For Arrestee Dna And Other Biometric Databases, David H. Kaye

Journal Articles

Routine DNA sampling following a custodial arrest process is now the norm in many jurisdictions, but is it consistent with the Fourth Amendment? The few courts that have addressed the question have disagreed on the answer, but all of them seem to agree on two points: (1) the reasonableness of the practice turns on a direct form of balancing of individual and governmental interests; and (2) individuals who are convicted — and even those who are merely arrested — have a greatly diminished expectation of privacy in their identities. This Article disputes these propositions and offers an improved framework for …

Pass Parallel Privacy Standards Or Privacy Perishes, Anne T. Mckenna

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Taxing Privacy, Hayes R. Holderness

Law Faculty Publications

In the United States, many low-income citizens are being held to a harsher standard than wealthier citizens — these low-income citizens are being asked to relinquish their privacy in order to obtain the public assistance they need, whereas wealthier individuals are not subjected to similar levels of public scrutiny for government benefits that they claim. Giving up privacy can have devastating effects on individuals’ lives — they may suffer various dignitary harms, may experience repressed abilities to express themselves, and may even be coerced into important life decisions by the government. This situation presents a unique problem to the neediest …

"Pets Must Be On A Leash": How U.S. Law (And Industry Practice) Often Undermines And Even Forbids Valuable Privacy Enhancing Technology, A. Michael Froomkin

Articles

No abstract provided.

Privacy Laws And Privacy Levers: Online Surveillance Versus Economic Development In The People’S Republic Of China, Ann Bartow

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This Essay describes and contextualizes the ongoing efforts by the Communist Party of China (CPC) to reconcile two dramatically competing interests: the desire to extensively monitor the communications of its citizenry, and a burning ambition to further develop its banking and financial industries, its high tech innovation capabilities, and its overall share of the “knowledge economy.”

Monitoring and censoring communications, especially via “one-to-many” social networking platforms, is viewed as essential for the prevention of mass anti-Party political activities ranging from peaceful civil disobedience to armed insurrection and for the protection of the reputations of individual Party leaders. Mobile Internet technologies …

Social Data, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

As online social media grow, it is increasingly important to distinguish between the different threats to privacy that arise from the conversion of our social interactions into data. One well-recognized threat is from the robust concentrations of electronic information aggregated into colossal databases. Yet much of this same information is also consumed socially and dispersed through a user interface to hundreds, if not thousands, of peer users.

In order to distinguish relationally shared information from the threat of the electronic database, this essay identifies the massive amounts of personal information shared via the user interface of social technologies as “social …

Intellectual Property And Public Health – A White Paper, Ryan G. Vacca, James Ming Chen, Jay Dratler Jr., Thomas Folsom, Timothy S. Hall, Yaniv Heled, Frank A. Pasquale Iii, Elizabeth A. Reilly, Jeffrey Samuels, Katherine J. Strandburg, Kara W. Swanson, Andrew W. Torrance, Katharine A. Van Tassel

Law Faculty Scholarship

On October 26, 2012, the University of Akron School of Law’s Center for Intellectual Property and Technology hosted its Sixth Annual IP Scholars Forum. In attendance were thirteen legal scholars with expertise and an interest in IP and public health who met to discuss problems and potential solutions at the intersection of these fields. This report summarizes this discussion by describing the problems raised, areas of agreement and disagreement between the participants, suggestions and solutions made by participants and the subsequent evaluations of these suggestions and solutions. Led by the moderator, participants at the Forum focused generally on three broad …

Intellectual Property And Public Health – A White Paper, Ryan G. Vacca, James Ming Chen, Jay Dratler Jr., Thomas Folsom, Timothy S. Hall, Yaniv Heled, Frank A. Pasquale, Elizabeth A. Reilly, Jeffery Samuels, Katherine J. Strandburg, Kara W. Swanson, Andrew W. Torrance, Katharine A. Van Tassel

Faculty Scholarship

On October 26, 2012, the University of Akron School of Law’s Center for Intellectual Property and Technology hosted its Sixth Annual IP Scholars Forum. In attendance were thirteen legal scholars with expertise and an interest in IP and public health who met to discuss problems and potential solutions at the intersection of these fields. This report summarizes this discussion by describing the problems raised, areas of agreement and disagreement between the participants, suggestions and solutions made by participants and the subsequent evaluations of these suggestions and solutions. Led by the moderator, participants at the Forum focused generally on three broad …

Durkheim's Internet: Social And Political Theory In Online Society, Ari Ezra Waldman

Articles & Chapters

While the Internet has changed dramatically since the early 1990s, the legal regime governing the right to privacy online and Internet speech is still steeped in a myth of the Internet user, completely hidden from others, in total control of his online experience, and free to come and go as he pleases. This false image of the “virtual self” has also contributed to an ethos of lawlessness, irresponsibility, and radical individuation online, allowing the evisceration of online privacy and the proliferation of hate and harassment.

I argue that the myth of the online anonym is not only false as a …

Preserving Privacy In A Digital Age: Lessons Of Comparative Constitutionalism, David Cole

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In the modern age, we increasingly live our lives through, and accompanied by, digital media. Virtually every transaction or communication that uses such media, as well as every move of mobile phone owners, is recorded. Computers are able to store, transmit, and analyze the data as never before, drawing on multiple sources to construct an intimate picture of our interests, contacts, travels and desires. Private data-mining services, most often used for commercial advertising purposes, can determine: what we read, listen to, and look at; where we travel to, shop, and dine; and with whom we speak or associate. Meanwhile, social …

Real Masks And Real Name Policies: Applying Anti-Mask Case Law To Anonymous Online Speech, Margot E. Kaminski

Publications

The First Amendment protects anonymous speech, but the scope of that protection has been the subject of much debate. This Article adds to the discussion of anonymous speech by examining anti-mask statutes and cases as an analogue for the regulation of anonymous speech online. Anti-mask case law answers a number of questions left open by the Supreme Court. It shows that courts have used the First Amendment to protect anonymity beyond core political speech, when mask-wearing is expressive conduct or shows a nexus with free expression. This Article explores what the anti-mask cases teach us about anonymity online, including proposed …

The Fight To Frame Privacy, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

The resolution of a debate often hinges on how the problem being debated is presented. In psychology and related disciplines, this method of issue presentation is known as framing. Framing theory holds that even small changes in the presentation of an issue or event can produce significant changes of opinion. Framing has become increasingly important in discussions about privacy and security. In his new book, "Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff Between Privacy and Security," Daniel Solove argues that if we continue to view privacy and security as diametrically opposed to each other, privacy will always lose. Solove argues that …

The Case For Online Obscurity, Woodrow Hartzog, Frederic Stutzman

Faculty Scholarship

On the Internet, obscure information has a minimal risk of being discovered or understood by unintended recipients. Empirical research demonstrates that Internet users rely on obscurity perhaps more than anything else to protect their privacy. Yet, online obscurity has been largely ignored by courts and lawmakers. In this Article, we argue that obscurity is a critical component of online privacy, but it has not been embraced by courts and lawmakers because it has never been adequately defined or conceptualized. This lack of definition has resulted in the concept of online obscurity being too insubstantial to serve as a helpful guide …

Commentary, Critical Legal Theory In Intellectual Property And Information Law Scholarship, Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal Spring Symposium, Sonia K. Katyal, Peter Goodrich

Faculty Scholarship

The very definition and scope of CLS (critical legal studies) is itself subject to debate. Some scholars characterize CLS as scholarship that employs a particular methodology—more of a “means” than an “end.” On the other hand, some scholars contend that CLS scholarship demonstrates a collective commitment to a political end goal—an emancipation of sorts —through the identification of, and resistance to, exploitative power structures that are reinforced through law and legal institutions. After a brief golden age, CLS scholarship was infamously marginalized in legal academia and its sub-disciplines. But CLS themes now appear to be making a resurgence—at least in …

'No Body Left Behind': Re-Orienting School-Based Childhood Obesity Interventions, Lindsay Wiley

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Although there are now laws on the books in virtually every jurisdiction aimed at addressing childhood obesity in K-12 schools, these efforts are inadequate and may even be misguided in important ways. Efforts aimed at health promotion - through healthier eating and increased physical activity - remain woefully underfunded even as they proliferate at every level of government. It is one thing to enact a requirement that all schools offer a minimum number of minutes of physical education each week or that school lunches include more fruits and vegetables. But it is quite another to make the budgetary commitment to …

Teaching Access, Or Freedom Of Information Law, Richard J. Peltz-Steele

Faculty Publications

Based on the author's experience developing and administering the course and materials, this article provides an introduction and resources to teach a graduate journalism or professional law school course on access to government, commonly called "freedom of information law", which may be constructed as a capstone course in law school. The appendices provide supporting material and references.