Law Commons^™

Charles Reich And The Legal History Of Privacy, Sarah Seo

Faculty Scholarship

Historians’ interest in Reich offers a case study of the relationship between historical and legal studies. What can legal scholars learn from historians, and what can historians learn from legal scholarship? This Essay will explore these two questions by focusing on Igo’s The Known Citizen since she encountered Reich not with the dual citizenship of a legal historian but as an intellectual historian. I will first highlight what legal scholars can learn from historians by summarizing the main arguments in The Known Citizen. Then, I will provide an alternative legal account to Igo’s history of privacy, which may clear …

Informed Trading And Cybersecurity Breaches, Joshua Mitts, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

Cybersecurity has become a significant concern in corporate and commercial settings, and for good reason: a threatened or realized cybersecurity breach can materially affect firm value for capital investors. This paper explores whether market arbitrageurs appear systematically to exploit advance knowledge of such vulnerabilities. We make use of a novel data set tracking cybersecurity breach announcements among public companies to study trading patterns in the derivatives market preceding the announcement of a breach. Using a matched sample of unaffected control firms, we find significant trading abnormalities for hacked targets, measured in terms of both open interest and volume. Our results …

Privacy-Privacy Tradeoffs, David E. Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

Legal and policy debates about privacy revolve around conflicts between privacy and other goods. But privacy also conflicts with itself. Whenever securing privacy on one margin compromises privacy on another margin, a privacy-privacy tradeoff arises.

This Essay introduces the phenomenon of privacy-privacy tradeoffs, with particular attention to their role in NSA surveillance. After explaining why these tradeoffs are pervasive in modern society and developing a typology, the Essay shows that many of the arguments made by the NSA's defenders appeal not only to a national-security need but also to a privacy-privacy tradeoff. An appreciation of these tradeoffs, the Essay contends, …

When The Curtain Must Be Drawn: American Experience With Proceedings Involving Information That, For Reasons Of National Security, Cannot Be Disclosed, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

In numerous contexts today, ranging from no-fly lists, to the designation of foreign terrorist organizations, to controls over foreign investments in the United States, federal authorities reach decisions having dramatic consequences for individuals’ liberty and property on the basis of information that those individuals cannot obtain, even in summary form. Recent and pending litigation has challenged these deprivations on due process grounds, with only moderate success. Perhaps unclassified information on which the government has acted must be revealed, with an opportunity given to challenge it and to submit contrary evidence; but in the words of the DC Circuit writing last …

Digital Security In The Expository Society: Spectacle, Surveillance, And Exhibition In The Neoliberal Age Of Big Data, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

In 1827, Nicolaus Heinrich Julius, a professor at the University of Berlin, identified an important architectural mutation in nineteenth-century society that reflected a deep disruption in our technologies of knowledge and a profound transformation in relations of power across society: Antiquity, Julius observed, had discovered the architectural form of the spectacle; but modern times had operated a fundamental shift from spectacle to surveillance. Michel Foucault would elaborate this insight in his 1973 Collège de France lectures on The Punitive Society, where he would declare: “[T]his is precisely what happens in the modern era: the reversal of the spectacle into surveillance…. …

Rethinking Privacy, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

Anxiety about surveillance and data mining has led many to embrace implausibly expansive and rigid conceptions of privacy. The premises of some current privacy arguments do not fit well with the broader political commitments of those who make them. In particular, liberals seem to have lost touch with the reservations about privacy expressed in the social criticism of some decades ago. They seem unable to imagine that preoccupation with privacy might amount to a “pursuit of loneliness” or how “eyes on the street” might have reassuring connotations. Without denying the importance of the effort to define and secure privacy values, …

Governing, Exchanging, Securing: Big Data And The Production Of Digital Knowledge, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

The emergence of Big Data challenges the conventional boundaries between governing, exchange, and security. It ambiguates the lines between commerce and surveillance, between governing and exchanging, between democracy and the police state. The new digital knowledge reproduces consuming subjects who wittingly or unwittingly allow themselves to be watched, tracked, linked and predicted in a blurred amalgam of commercial and governmental projects. Linking back and forth from consumer data to government information to social media, these new webs of information become available to anyone who can purchase the information. How is it that governmental, commercial and security interests have converged, coincided, …

Quasi-Property: Like, But Not Quite Property, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

Faculty Scholarship

Quasi-property interests refer to situations in which the law seeks to simulate the idea of exclusion, normally associated with property rights, through a relational liability regime, by focusing on the nature and circumstances of the interaction in question, which is thought to merit a highly circumscribed form of exclusion. In this Article, I unpack the analytical and normative bases of quasi-property interests, examine the primary triggering events that cause courts to invoke the category, and respond to potential objections to the recognition of quasi-property as an independent category of interests in the law.

The So-Called Right To Privacy, Jamal Greene

Faculty Scholarship

The constitutional right to privacy has been a conservative bugaboo ever since Justice Douglas introduced it into the United States Reports in Griswold v. Connecticut. Reference to the "so-called" right to privacy has become code for the view that the right is doctrinally recognized but not in fact constitutionally enshrined. This Article argues that the constitutional right to privacy is no more. The two rights most associated historically with the right to privacy are abortion and intimate sexual conduct, yet Gonzales v. Carhart and Lawrence v. Texas made clear that neither of these rights is presently justified by its …

Beyond Lawrence: Metaprivacy And Punishment, Jamal Greene

Faculty Scholarship

Lawrence v. Texas remains, after three years of precedential life, an opinion in search of a principle. It is both libertarian – Randy Barnett has called it the constitutionalization of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty – and communitarian – William Eskridge has described it as the gay rights movement's Brown v. Board of Education. It is simultaneously broad, in its evocation of our deepest spiritual commitments, and narrow, in its self-conscious attempts to avoid condemning laws against same-sex marriage, prostitution, and bestiality. This Article reconciles these competing claims on Lawrence's jurisprudential legacy. In Part I, it defends the …

Edith Wharton, Privacy, And Publicity, Jessica Bulman-Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

"It's the woman's soul, absolutely torn up by the roots-her whole self laid bare .... I don't mean to read another line; it's too much like listening at a keyhole." When Mrs. Touchett speaks these words in Edith Wharton's early novella, The Touchstone, we may wonder whether Wharton is mocking her own voyeuristic readership and grappling with her tenuous privacy as a professional female author. Despite her protestations, Mrs. Touchett has relished reading the letters of Mrs. Aubyn, a deceased novelist whose former lover, Stephen Glennard, has published her correspondence. It is precisely because these love letters (or "unloved letters" …

The Domesticated Liberty Of Lawrence V. Texas, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

In this Commentary, Professor Franke offers an account of the Supreme Court's decision in Lawrence v. Texas. She concludes that in overruling the earlier Bowers v. Hardwick decision, Justice Kennedy does not rely upon a robust form of freedom made available by the Court's earlier reproductive rights cases, but instead announces a kind of privatized liberty right that affords gay and lesbian couples the right to intimacy in the bedroom. In this sense, the rights-holders in Lawrence are people in relationships and the liberty right those couples enjoy does not extend beyond the domain of the private. Franke expresses …

The International Privacy Regime, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

Privacy has joined one of many areas of law understandable only by reference to the results of overlapping and conflicting national agendas. What has emerged as the de facto international regime is complex. Yet based on a few simplifying principles, we can nonetheless do much to understand it and predict its operation.

First, the idea that self-regulation by the internet community will be the driving force in privacy protection must be laid to rest. The experience of the last decade shows that nation-states, powerful nation-states in particular, drive the system of international privacy. The final mix of privacy protection that …

An Institutional Emphasis, Lance Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Schwartz is an important scholar of the interface between the difficult moral concept of privacy and the new information technologies. Someday a book will tell the story of modem history through the lens of privacy: village lives well known to neighbors; the claims of the national state (taxes, military service); the social welfare state; and the possibilities and dangers of modem biology. As Paul Schwartz has written, DNA and other tools can tell us a great deal about ourselves and can improve our lives; they can also tell employers, drug companies, prospective in-laws, and the police things we prefer …

New York's Right Of Privacy – The Need For Change, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

In 1890 Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis wrote a famous article on the right to privacy. Concerned especially with newspaper publications about private and family matters, they urged that courts recognize an explicit right to privacy from unreasonable publicity. According to Warren and Brandeis, certain already recognized rights did in fact protect a person's wish to keep his private thoughts private, though these 1ights were founded on some more traditional legal theories. For example, the privilege of a writer of a letter to bar anyone's publication of the letter had been articulated in decisions as a property right, even when …

The Consent Problem In Wiretapping & Eavesdropping: Surreptitious Monitoring With The Consent Of A Participant In A Conversation, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

The extent to which American society should permit wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping has been considered by judges, legislators and scholars for many years, although this consideration has yet to result in legal rules that respond rationally and consistently to the conflicting demands of privacy and effective law enforcement. Constitutional analysis has, until very recently, relied on concepts like "physical invasion of a constitutionally protected area," producing distinctions with little relation to underlying social values; statutory restrictions on wiretapping have been much more severe than those imposed on eavesdropping, though the latter, particularly in light of the rapidly developing technology, poses …

Wiretapping And Bugging: Striking A Balance Between Privacy And Law Enforcement, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

The conflict between individual privacy and the needs of law enforcement occurs at a number of points in our system of criminal justice. It is not unique to wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping, but the competing claims in that area do have their own special character. They are qualitatively different from those in regard to, say, confessions. The kinds of crimes and criminals affected are different, as are the relevant assertions about individual freedom.

Law enforcement officials, almost to a man, consider wiretapping and eavesdropping valuable weapons in the fight against crime. They are most helpful in regard to consensual crimes …