Law Commons^™

A Loaded God Complex: The Unconstitutionality Of The Executive Branch’S Unilaterally Withholding Zero-Days, Brendan Gilligan

Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property

No abstract provided.

Cannibalizing The Constitution: On Terrorism, The Second Amendment, And The Threat To Civil Liberties, Francesca Laguardia

JCLC Online

This article explores the links between internet radicalization, access to weapons, and the current threat from terrorists who have been radicalized online. The prevalence of domestic terrorism, domestic hate groups, and online incitement and radicalization have led to considerable focus on the tension between counterterror efforts and the First Amendment. Many scholars recommend rethinking the extent of First Amendment protection, as well as Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendment protections, and some judges appear to be listening. Yet the Second Amendment has avoided this consideration, despite the fact that easy access to weapons is a necessary ingredient for the level of …

Deepfake Privacy: Attitudes And Regulation, Matthew B. Kugler, Carly Pace

Northwestern University Law Review

Using only a series of images of a person’s face and publicly available software, it is now possible to insert the person’s likeness into a video and show them saying or doing almost anything. This “deepfake” technology has permitted an explosion of political satire and, especially, fake pornography. Several states have already passed laws regulating deepfakes, and more are poised to do so. This Article presents three novel empirical studies that assess public attitudes toward this new technology. In our main study, a representative sample of the U.S. adult population perceived nonconsensually created pornographic deepfake videos as extremely harmful and …

Pure Privacy, Jeffrey Bellin

Northwestern University Law Review

In 1890, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis began a storied legal tradition of trying to conceptualize privacy. Since that time, privacy’s appeal has grown beyond those authors’ wildest expectations, but its essence remains elusive. One of the rare points of agreement in boisterous academic privacy debates is that there is no consensus on what privacy means.

The modern trend is to embrace the ambiguity. Unable to settle on boundaries, scholars welcome a broad array of interests into an expanding theoretical framework. As a result, privacy is invoked in debates about COVID-19 contact tracing, police body cameras, marriage equality, facial recognition, …

Comparative Limitations On Abortions: The United States Supreme Court V. The European Court Of Human Rights, Sunaya Padmanabhan

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

This Note compares the balancing tests implemented by the United States Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights to determine the legal status of abortion within their jurisdictions. This Note will argue that the Supreme Court’s balancing test better protects a woman’s legal path to an abortion because it A) limits states’ restrictions to specific categories and B) regulates the extent to which states can restrict a woman’s pre-viability abortion.

This Note will also examine the ways in which each court’s abortion jurisprudence substantively restricts a woman’s ability to obtain an abortion, even where legal avenues to the …

The Fourth Amendment Stripped Bare: Substantiating Prisoners' Reasonable Right To Bodily Privacy, Meher Babbar

Northwestern University Law Review

Prisoners’ rights to bodily privacy under the Fourth Amendment are limited, allowing detention officials to strip-search them for contraband. The extent to which the Fourth Amendment protects prisoners, however, is uncertain. Questions regarding whether strip searches require reasonable suspicion and the manner in which officials may conduct strip searches have troubled courts for decades. In the absence of clear guidance from the Supreme Court, courts have reached inconsistent conclusions, imperiling the human rights and dignity of prisoners. This Note argues that courts should define and apply prisoners’ rights to bodily privacy with reference to international human-rights law, specifically the United …

Trading Privacy For Promotion? Fourth Amendment Implications Of Employers Using Wearable Sensors To Assess Worker Performance, George M. Dery Iii

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

This Article considers the Fourth Amendment implications of a study on a passive monitoring system where employees shared data from wearables, phone applications, and position beacons that provided private information such as weekend phone use, sleep patterns in the bedroom, and emotional states. The study’s authors hope to use the data collected to create a new system for objectively assessing employee performance that will replace the current system which is plagued by the inherent bias of self-reporting and peer-review and which is labor intensive and inefficient. The researchers were able to successfully link the data collected with the quality of …

Do You Accept These Cookies? How The General Data Protection Regulation Keeps Consumer Information Safe, Jayne Chorpash

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

Abstract:

This note examines the General Data Protection Regulation implemented in the EU in 2018. The GDPR was the result of a long history of data privacy laws that have been met with varying levels of success. While the GDPR has retained many characteristics that have made past privacy laws successful, it has also made some important changes. Most notably, the GDPR gives generous rights to consumers to guard and protect their data, which is of growing concern in light of how easy it is to share information in our modern age. Additionally, the GDPR has a much broader territorial …

Riley And Abandonment: Expanding Fourth Amendment Protection Of Cell Phones, Abigail Hoverman

Northwestern University Law Review

In light of the privacy concerns inherent to personal technological devices, the Supreme Court handed down a unanimous decision in 2014 recognizing the need for categorical heightened protection of cell phones during searches incident to arrest in Riley v. California. This Note argues for expansion of heightened protections for cell phones in the context of abandoned evidence because the same privacy concerns apply. This argument matters because state and federal courts have not provided the needed protection to abandoned cell phones pre- or post-Riley.

Knowledge And Fourth Amendment Privacy, Matthew Tokson

Northwestern University Law Review

This Article examines the central role that knowledge plays in determining the Fourth Amendment’s scope. What people know about surveillance practices or new technologies often shapes the “reasonable expectations of privacy” that define the Fourth Amendment’s boundaries. From early decisions dealing with automobile searches to recent cases involving advanced information technologies, courts have relied on assessments of knowledge in a wide variety of Fourth Amendment contexts. Yet the analysis of knowledge in Fourth Amendment law is rarely if ever studied on its own.

This Article fills that gap. It starts by identifying the characteristics of Fourth Amendment knowledge. It finds, …

Forced Decryption As Equilibrium—Why It’S Constitutional And How Riley Matters, Dan Terzian

Northwestern University Law Review

This Essay considers whether the government can force a person to decrypt his computer. The only courts to consider the issue limited their analyses to rote application of predigital doctrine and dicta. This is a mistake; courts should instead aim to maintain the ex ante equilibrium of privacy and government power. This approach—seeking equilibrium—was just endorsed by the Supreme Court in Riley v. California, a recent Fourth Amendment case. Yet Riley’s rationale also extends to the Fifth Amendment’s Self-Incrimination Clause, and maintaining equilibrium there requires permitting forced decryption. Because current doctrine can be interpreted as allowing forced decryption, …

Reviving The Privacy Protection Act Of 1980, Elizabeth B. Uzelac

Northwestern University Law Review

The federal privacy legislative scheme is composed of a fragmented patchwork of aging sector-specific statutes—many enacted prior to the advent of the home computer—that supplement the Fourth Amendment to regulate government access to information. The Privacy Protection Act of 1980 is one such statute, though few understand or utilize its protections. The Act prohibits law enforcement officials from searching for or seizing information from people who disseminate information to the public, such as reporters. Where it applies, the Act requires law enforcement officials to instead rely on compliance with a subpoena or the target’s voluntary cooperation to gain access to …

Mug Shot Disclosure Under Foia: Does Privacy Or Public Interest Prevail?, Kathryn Shephard

Northwestern University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Update: Coppa Is Ineffective Legislation! Next Steps For Protecting Youth Privacy Rights In The Social Networking Era, Lauren A. Matecki

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

In 1998, Congress passed the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) in response to growing concerns over the dissemination of children's personal information over the Internet. Under COPPA's provisions, websites are prohibited from collecting personal information from children under the age of twelve without "verifiable parental consent." While in theory COPPA sought to provide parents the control over their children's personal information on the Internet, its practical effect causes websites to attempt to ban children through age screening mechanisms that remain largely ineffective.Twelve years after the passage of COPPA, the landscape of the Internet is dramatically changed. Social networking websites …

Natural Law - A Libertarian View, Anthony D'Amato

Faculty Working Papers

What follows from the following two propositions? Legal positivism views law as a command writ large. The commander is the person or group with the most power. Answer: this pernicious mind-set is responsible for our abandonment of personal liberty. For there can be no limit to the imagination and will power of the commander. The plenary jurisdiction of the commander paves the way for Big Government to move in and regulate every aspect of our lives and our privacy. The world wasn't always like this. Prior to the servility that positivism has induced, there was a now-forgotten secular natural law …

A (My)Space Of One's Own: On Privacy And Online Social Networks, Patricia Sanchez Abril

Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property

No abstract provided.

Science Fiction And Shed Dna, D. H. Kaye

NULR Online

No abstract provided.

Preserving Internet Expression While Protecting Our Children: Solutions Following Ashcroft V. Aclu, Steven E. Merlis

Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property

No abstract provided.

Transborder Data Flow: Separating The Privacy Interests Of Individuals And Corporations, Garry S. Grossman

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

The merger of computer and communications technologies in the past two decades has revolutionized information processing throughout the world. The most recent telecommunications advances possible direct international transfers of sensitive personal data via computer-satellite links. Computerized data bases containing commercial information identifying citizens of one country are now routinely transferred to and stored in another, often without the knowledge of the individuals identified in the data. Numerous European countries have enacted data protection legislation with the avowed intent to protect their citizens from the improper use of personal information that is transferred extranationally. These data protection laws prohibit the export …