Privacy Law Commons^™

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 …

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 …

Screened Out Of Housing: The Impact Of Misleading Tenant Screening Reports And The Potential For Criminal Expungement As A Model For Effectively Sealing Evictions, Katelyn Polk

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

Having an eviction record “blacklists” tenants from finding future housing. Even renters with mere eviction filings—not eviction orders—on their records face the harsh collateral consequences of eviction. This Note argues that eviction records should be sealed at filing and only released into the public record if a landlord prevails in court. Juvenile record expungement mechanisms in Illinois serve as a model for one way to protect people with eviction records. Recent updates to the Illinois juvenile expungement process provided for the automatic expungement of certain records and strengthened the confidentiality protections of juvenile records. Illinois protects juvenile records because it …