Law Commons^™

Show And Tell?: Students' Personal Lives, Schools, And Parents, Emily Gold Waldman

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Public schools learn about their students' personal lives in many ways. Some are passive: a teacher observes a student kissing someone, or overhears a conversation among friends. But schools also engage in more active information-gathering about students' personal lives, through surveys and informal conversations between students and teachers, administrators, school psychologists, counselors, coaches, and other personnel. This Article explores the competing privacy considerations that result from such encounters. Once schools have learned highly personal information about their students, does it violate those students' privacy rights to disclose that information to their parents? Or does keeping the information secret violate the …

The Fourth Amendment And Surveillance In A Digital World, Arthur Leavens

Faculty Scholarship

Technology has transformed government surveillance and opened traditionally private information to official scrutiny. The current privacy-based approach to the Fourth Amendment is unable to cope with the changes. This Article offers a solution to the problems that technological surveillance techniques present. Starting with the introduction of the approach in Katz, the Article reviews the development of privacy-based approach. It then looks at three 21st century Supreme Court cases that grappled with applying the Katz test to advanced technological surveillance techniques: Kyllo, Quon, and Jones. These cases demonstrate the problems that the privacy-based approach creates and the …

Justice Scalia's Fourth Amendment: Text, Context, Clarity, And Occasional Faint-Hearted Originalism, Timothy C. Macdonnell

Scholarly Articles

Since joining the United States Supreme Court in 1986, Justice Scalia has been a prominent voice on the Fourth Amendment, having written twenty majority opinions, twelve concurrences, and six dissents on the topic. Under his pen, the Court has altered its test for determining when the Fourth Amendment should apply; provided a vision to address technology's encroachment on privacy; and articulated the standard for determining whether government officials are entitled to qualified immunity in civil suits involving alleged Fourth Amendment violations. In most of Justice Scalia's opinions, he has championed an originalist/textualist theory of constitutional interpretation. Based on that theory, …

Human Rights Hero: The Supreme Court In Griswold V. Connecticut, Stephen Wermiel

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Outing Privacy, Scott Skinner-Thompson

Publications

The government regularly outs information concerning people's sexuality, gender identity, and HIV status. Notwithstanding the implications of such outings, the Supreme Court has yet to resolve whether the Constitution contains a right to informational privacy - a right to limit the government's ability to collect and disseminate personal information.

This Article probes informational privacy theory and jurisprudence to better understand the judiciary's reluctance to fully embrace a constitutional right to informational privacy. The Article argues that while existing scholarly theories of informational privacy encourage us to broadly imagine the right and its possibilities, often focusing on informational privacy's ability to …

Intelligence Legalism And The National Security Agency’S Civil Liberties Gap, Margo Schlanger

Articles

Since June 2013, we have seen unprecedented security breaches and disclosures relating to American electronic surveillance. The nearly daily drip, and occasional gush, of once-secret policy and operational information makes it possible to analyze and understand National Security Agency activities, including the organizations and processes inside and outside the NSA that are supposed to safeguard American’s civil liberties as the agency goes about its intelligence gathering business. Some have suggested that what we have learned is that the NSA is running wild, lawlessly flouting legal constraints on its behavior. This assessment is unfair. In fact, the picture that emerges from …

Law As An Ally Or Enemy In The War On Cyberbullying: Exploring The Contested Terrain Of Privacy And Other Legal Concepts In The Age Of Technology And Social Media, A. Wayne Mackay

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This article focuses on the role and limits of law as a response to cyberbullying. The problem of cyberbullying engages many of our most fundamental legal concepts and provides an interesting case study. Even when there is general agreement that the problem merits a legal response, there are significant debates about what that response should be. Which level and what branch of government can and should best respond? What is the most appropriate legal process for pursuing cyberbullies—traditional legal avenues or more creative restorative approaches? How should the rights and responsibilities of perpetrators, victims and even bystanders be balanced? Among …

The Substance Of Self-Government, James E. Fleming

Faculty Scholarship

In Democratic Rights: The Substance of Self-Government, Corey Brettschneider develops an attractive and powerful conception of self-government - the value theory of democracy - that encompasses both substantive rights like privacy and procedural rights. Although he argues, following Habermas and Rawls, that substantive rights and procedural rights are "co-original," the structure of his theory may lead him to reduce the former into the latter and not fully to account for personal self-government in his conception of democratic self-government. The wages of his democratic justifications for substantive rights may be a surprising anxiety or unwarranted tension concerning judicial review protecting such …

Robots In The Home: What Will We Have Agreed To?, Margot E. Kaminski

Publications

A new technology can expose the cracks in legal doctrine. Sometimes a technology resists analogy. Sometimes, through analogies, it reveals inconsistencies in the law, or basic flaws in framing, or in the fit between different parts of the legal system. This Essay addresses robots in the home, and what they reveal about U.S. privacy law. Household robots might not themselves uproot U.S. privacy law, but they will reveal its inconsistencies, and show where it is most likely to fracture. Just as drones are serving as a legislative “privacy catalyst” — encouraging the enactment of new privacy laws as people realize …

Marital Supremacy And The Constitution Of The Nonmarital Family, Serena Mayeri

All Faculty Scholarship

Despite a transformative half century of social change, marital status still matters. The marriage equality movement has drawn attention to the many benefits conferred in law by marriage at a time when the “marriage gap” between affluent and poor Americans widens and rates of nonmarital childbearing soar. This Essay explores the contested history of marital supremacy—the legal privileging of marriage—through the lens of the “illegitimacy” cases of the 1960s and 1970s. Often remembered as a triumph for nonmarital families, these decisions defined the constitutional harm of illegitimacy classifications as the unjust punishment of innocent children for the “sins” of their …