Privacy Law Commons^™

Davis V. Dist. Ct., 123 Nev. Adv. Op. 58 (Aug. 27, 2026), Tristen Fleig

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

In Davis v. Dist. Ct., the Supreme Court upheld the court's authority to issue orders and impose sanctions during discovery, after Petitioner claimed NAC 641.234(3) limited the court's authority to order disclosure of psychologist data.

Las Vegas Police Protective Association V. Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Citizen Review Board, 142 Nev. Adv. Op. 55 (Aug. 20, 2026), Enya Dinca

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

Under Las Vegas Police Protective Association v. Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Citizen Review Board, the CRB must identify officers under review on public meeting agendas, and officers lack a nontrivial privacy interest in names and badge numbers that are already publicly disclosed.

Brief Of Public Health And Health Law Scholars As Amici Curiae Urging Affirmance In Support Of Plaintiffs-Appellees, Rachel L. Zacharias, Zeinab Bakhet, Kevin Costello, Maya Manian

Amicus Briefs & Court Filings

INTRODUCTION: Physicians’ use of their judgment and expertise to prescribe drugs and devices for purposes other than those approved by the Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”)—colloquially known as off-label use—is an indispensable feature of modern medicine. The FDA approves drugs as “safe and effective for specific indications.” Christopher M. Wittich, Christopher M. Burkle & William L. Lanier, Ten Common Questions (and Their Answers) About OffLabel Drug Use, 87 Mayo Clinic Procs. 982, 982 (2012). Federal law then generally leaves prescribing decisions, including off-label use of FDA-approved drugs and devices for a patient’s particular indication, to physicians acting under state law …

Think Your Cellphone Data Is Protected Without A Search Warrant? Think Again., Adam M. Gershowitz

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

Toward A Private Law Of Intimates' Obligations, Emily J. Stolzenberg

Faculty Publications

When former cohabitants ask courts to distribute property at the end of a nonmarital relationship, they usually lose—even when the partners were as economically intertwined as spouses. Family law scholars have traditionally criticized these cases in terms of longstanding gendered ideas about family relationships. This Article proposes a complementary account at the intersection of feminist and private law theory: that the law of voluntary obligations is not adequately developed to protect intimates’ cooperation. Although marital status law aims to safeguard thick cooperation between spouses and contract law captures a range of more market-based cooperation, for historically contingent reasons, little doctrine …

On The Right To Obscurity, Woodrow Hartzog, Evan Selinger

Faculty Scholarship

Tragically, U.S. privacy law has neglected to address a significant dimension of privacy. While lawmakers and judges have routinely recognized intrusions into our secluded spaces and breaches of our confidentiality and secrecy, they have largely failed to protect our most common yet also our most underappreciated form of privacy: the practical obscurity that allows us to live freely and with dignity. Obscurity, which is the state of protection that arises when personal information is difficult for some people to obtain or correctly interpret, serves several vital interests: (1) it safeguards our ability to express ourselves without fear that everything we …

Democratic Legitimacy And Data Governance: Data Privacy Philosophy And Regulatory Preferences In The U.S. Vs Eu, Mia H. Truong

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence and large-scale data collection has intensified tensions between commercial innovation and consumer privacy, raising a fundamental democratic question: do Americans understand their data protections–and does this shape their demand for regulation? The EU and U.S. represent two fundamentally opposed approaches to data privacy regulation: the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) treats personal data as a fundamental human right, rooted in post-WWII constitutional protections against state surveillance and authoritarianism, while the U.S. operates through fragmented, sector-specific state laws that treat personal data as a market commodity. This study is the first to empirically investigate …

Workplace Monitoring Platforms Are Sharing Your Data: An Investigation & Roadmap To Address Data Abuses, Stephanie T. Nguyen, Levi Kaplan, David Choffnes, Alan Mislove, Seth Frotman, Erie Meyer

Center for Law and the Economy

This report investigates the data collection practices of nine widely used workplace monitoring platforms to determine the extent to which they track and analyze employee activity, behavior, or performance during work, including how these platforms transmit worker information and to which third-parties. This report finds that (1) nine out of nine workplace monitoring platforms studied directly shared identifying worker data to third parties, (2) nine out of nine workplace monitoring platforms studied shared information about workers’ online activities with third parties, and (3) three out of nine workplace monitoring platforms studied utilize features to track workers’ precise location. This report …

Cognitive Warfare: Generative Ai, False Realities, And International Humanitarian Law, Gary Corn

Joint PIJIP/TLS Research Paper Series

This paper, written as a draft chapter for the Lieber Institute for Law and Land Warfare's forthcoming book on International Law and Artificial Intelligence in Armed Conflict: The AI-Cyber Interplay, explores the IHL implications of a specific subfield or category of AI—Generative AI (GenAI). This new and rapidly evolving technology does not merely analyze or classify data; it also generates original image, audio, and video content. This synthetic content can be highly deceptive and manipulative, as in the case of so-called “deepfakes.” Combined with other information and communications technologies (ICT) and AI capabilities, GenAI has the potential to drastically transform …

Brokering Safety, Chinmayi Sharma, Thomas E. Kadri, Sam Adler

Articles

For victims of abuse, safety means hiding. Not just hiding themselves, but also their contact details, their address, their workplace, their roommates, and any other information that could enable their abuser to target them. Yet today, no number of name changes and relocations can prevent data brokers from sharing a victim's personal information online. Thanks to brokers, abusers can find what they need with a single search, a few clicks, and a few dollars. For many victims, then, the best hope for safety lies in obscurity-that is, making themselves and their information harder to find.

This Article exposes privacy law's …

A Legal Transplant Failure In The Ai Age, Xuan-Thao Nguyen

Articles

Thailand positions itself as the new AI-driven innovation hub in the Southeast Asia region as Big Tech companies invest billions in building new data centers to power the AI transformations in all sectors in Thailand. An integral part of Thailand’s new ambition is the legal transplant of personal data protection law from Europe. The transplant, however, is of form, not substance, as this Article illustrates the failure through in-depth analysis of Thailand’s Personal Data Protection Act and provides evidence of rampant violations and noncompliance by the largest ecommerce conglomerate and SMEs. This Article offers suggestions for Thailand to realign its …

On Predicting And Stopping Dystopia, Evan Selinger, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

Is it reasonable to be dystopian about how the future will likely unfold? We think so. For some time, we have been arguing that facial recognition technology is a perfect tool of oppression, and that its pernicious affordances are leading society down a slippery slope toward the evisceration of privacy by obscurity. This is a soft form of “determinism”—the notion that while technology is not an unstoppable force and the future is not preordained, there nevertheless are identifiable factors, such as the invitingness of affordances, human nature, and incentives that drive technology in certain directions and make some social outcomes …

Kodak To Deepfakes: Publicity Rights And Abuse Of Our Likenesses, Michael Goodyear

Other Publications

No abstract provided.

Disciplining Mechanisms: Governing Data Markets With Competition And Regulation, Peter Ormerod

Faculty Publications

The past decade has witnessed conceptual renewals in both competition law and information privacy law. These regulatory movements—Neo-Brandeis antitrust and structural data governance—share the objective of recalibrating the balance of power between individuals and the massive data-processing firms that now dominate modern life.

Despite their common ends, policy interventions drawn from these schools of thought can work at cross purposes: competitive pressure can induce data exploitation, and privacy rules tend to benefit the largest firms.

This Essay exposes the friction in their relationship and offers guidance on how to mediate their tension. Competition policy alone will prove ineffective at indirectly …

Online Age Gating: An Interdisciplinary Evaluation, Noah Apthorpe, Brett Frischmann, Yan Shvartzshnaider

Faculty Publications

The recent surge in regulation seeking to establish age-based governance online is part of a decades-long attempt to establish online zoning. It is driven by active development of technologies to estimate or verify user age based on various characteristics of users, their credentials, or their activities. However, these developments have heightened prevailing concerns that online age gating technology will inevitably be abused and misused to cause a variety of privacy harms and rights infringements. This paper examines this ongoing debate by bridging technical and legal scholarship to explore the current state of online age-based governance. We discuss the current legal …

Lunch Shaming And The Right To Privacy, Ira P. Robbins

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Lunch shaming is the practice of penalizing students who cannot afford to pay for their meals, resulting in them being denied food, served alternative meals, or publicly identified. The origins of lunch shaming can be traced to the financial pressures faced by school districts that struggle to balance tight budgets with the mandate to provide free or reduced-price meals to eligible students. Despite legislative efforts and advocacy campaigns aimed at mitigating the problems associated with lunch shaming, the practice persists, exacerbated by rising food costs and the expiration of pandemic-era food programs.

Many law journal and other articles have correctly …

Legislatively Erased: The Failure Of Privacy Legislation To Protect People Connected To The Criminal Legal System, Chaz Arnett, Kate Weisburd

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Obituary For The Birth Certificate, Malinda L. Seymore

Faculty Scholarship

Have birth certificates outlived their usefulness? Birth certificates establish an individual’s name, identity, age, race, sex and gender, parental authority, and citizenship. In addition, the information collected at the time of birth and reflected on a long-form birth certificate provides data for public health policy, population statistics, internal migration, government planning, and resource allocation. Birth certificates are also the all-access pass to American life, necessary for many functions of modern life: registering a child in school, signing a child up for soccer, getting a driver’s license and passport, enlisting in the military, and applying for government benefits. All of this, …

Information Law Pluralism, Hannah Bloch-Wehba

Faculty Scholarship

Information-intensive activities are reshaping political, social, and economic institutions. As they respond to these shifts, legislators and regulators are embracing information as a regulatory device for tech. Far from limiting themselves to public disclosure, consumer notice, and other traditional mechanisms of fostering transparency and information flows, however, legislators are using other, more nuanced tools to incentivize regulated entities to obtain, generate, and share information.

This Article maps the landscape of the emerging information-based regimes for regulating tech and assesses their conceptual and practical implications. It canvasses an extensive set of recently enacted laws regulating the information economy and shows that, …

The Stored Communications Act At 40: Re-Examining Ecs And Rcs In The Age Of Ai, Shanzay Pervaiz

Joint PIJIP/TLS Research Paper Series

Shanzay Pervaiz, Senior Legal Researcher, examines the Stored Communications Act (SCA) almost forty years after its enactment, focusing on how its core definitions of “electronic communication service” (ECS) and “remote computing service” (RCS) play a central role in regulating domestic and global government access to data. The definitions still shape key U.S. authorities such as FISA Section 702, the CLOUD Act, and international instruments governing law enforcement access to data, including the Budapest Convention and the United Nations Convention on Cybercrime. The paper also looks at the legislative history of the SCA, how U.S. courts define ECS and RCS, and …

Richmond Electronic Monitoring: The City Sees You While You're Sleeping, Fakira D. Johnson

Law Student Publications

The United States has increasingly recognized its reputation as a prison state, with widespread acknowledgment of its high incarceration rates. As of 2021, the United States imprisoned one out of every five prisoners in the world. Additionally, of its own population, the United States imprisoned one out of every one hundred people.

In response to this notoriety, worsening prison overcrowding, and the heightened risks posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, all fifty states, the District of Columbia, and the federal government increased their utilization of alternative measures to traditional incarceration. As both an addition and an alternative to traditional incarceration, criminal …

Data Rights For Workers, Pauline Kim, Rachel Leavitt

Scholarship@WashULaw

Workers are subject to immense amounts of data collection on the job, and the algorithmic management tools built with that data can produce negative effects, including deskilling jobs, unstable work hours, reduced wages, and dangerous and degrading working conditions. Workers thus have significant interests how their data are collected and used, and yet they have been excluded from nearly all the recently enacted or proposed data protection laws. Their exclusion stems from data protection’s roots in privacy law and theory, which primarily focused on consumers as data subjects. Current data protection laws, even if expanded to cover workers, would provide …

Beyond Digital Pessimism: How A Focus On Trust Can Enhance Eu Digital Law, Neil M. Richards, Woodrow Hartzog, Claire Boine, Lea Despotis

Scholarship@WashULaw

Lawmakers looking to foster technological innovation on the European market are adopting laws they hope will promote consumer trust in digital products. Their strategy can be broken down into three components. First, they aim to empower consumers to choose how much data they want to share with companies through an express consent framework. Second, they seek to avoid harms from digital products through product safety law such as adapting the Product Safety Regulation to digital products or adopting the AI Act. Third, they endeavor to prevent manipulation of consumers through digital means.

In this essay, we argue that while laudable, …

From Privacy To The Data Economy: The Ftc’S Reframing Of Its Regulatory Priorities, Maria P. Angel

Scholarly Works

This Article argues that the Federal Trade Commission’s turn to “commercial surveillance” reflects a strategic shift away from traditional privacy frameworks toward addressing structural power dynamics in the data economy. Drawing on an analysis of 112 FTC documents, it identifies three core commitments: tackling systemic harms, adopting a political economy lens, and constraining corporate power. The Article contends that this reframing is both necessary in the AI age and should influence the future of privacy regulation in the United States, even amid efforts to limit the FTC’s authority.

Inside, Outside, And In Between: Black Homeplace As A Blueprint For Privacy Law, Nina-Simone Edwards

Library Scholarship

This essay reimagines the meaning of home and privacy for Black Americans by interrogating the legal and technological systems that routinely collapse the sanctity of the homeplace. Using the no-knock warrant as a central case study, this essay illustrates how state-sanctioned intrusions transform a space of rest, memory, and self-making into a site of violence. Although Fourth Amendment doctrine purports to guard against unreasonable searches, its prevailing binary framework–distinguishing only between “inside” and “outside” the home–renders Black domestic spaces uniquely vulnerable. Drawing from Critical Race Theory, particularly its social construction thesis, this essay shows how race, law, and technology co-produce …

Forget Me Not? Machine Unlearning’S Implications For Privacy Law, Jevan Hutson, Cedric Whitney, Jay T. Conrad

Articles

Generative AI systems are increasingly relied on and are already actively reshaping how we think about privacy and data protection law. Models ingest and process vast amounts of personal and sensitive data, challenging assurances of compliance with legal frameworks like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) with increasing intensity. Machine unlearning is an emerging tool in practitioners’ attempts to address these challenges: the act of selectively removing or suppressing specific data, such as personal data that a data subject requests be deleted, from AI models as means of complying with legal obligations or …

Beyond Digital Pessimism: How A Focus On Trust Can Enhance Eu Digital Law, Neil Richards, Woodrow Hartzog, Claire Boine, Lea Despotis

Faculty Scholarship

Lawmakers looking to foster technological innovation on the European market are adopting laws they hope will promote consumer trust in digital products. Their strategy can be broken down into three components. First, they aim to empower consumers to choose how much data they want to share with companies through an express consent framework. Second, they seek to avoid harms from digital products through product safety law such as adapting the Product Safety Regulation to digital products or adopting the AI Act. Third, they endeavor to prevent manipulation of consumers through digital means.

In this essay, we argue that while laudable, …

Against Ai Half Measures, Woodrow Hartzog, Neil Richards, Ryan Durrie, Jordan Francis

Faculty Scholarship

So far, U.S. consumer protection policy for artificial intelligence (AI) accountability has largely consisted of industry-led approaches such as encouraging transparency, mitigating bias, promoting principles of ethics, and empowering people. These approaches are vital, but they are only half measures. To bring AI within the rule of law, lawmakers must start drawing substantive lines.

In this Article, we identify four AI regulatory approaches to consumer, data, and democratic harms as half measures. First, transparency does not produce accountability on its own. Second, while mitigating bias in AI systems is critical, even unbiased systems are a threat to the vulnerable. Third, …

The Hypocrisy Of Data Governance, Zubair Shafiq, Olivia Figueira, Athina Markopoulou, Woodrow Hartzog, Michael Lavine

Faculty Scholarship

“Data governance” is an empty term, like a Rorschach inkblot just waiting to be filled with meaning. Tech companies take advantage of this ambiguity to craft narratives about their data-governance capabilities to fit their audience and purpose. On one hand, tech companies brag about their data-governance capabilities when it fits their business model (for example, to advertisers) and public image (for example, to their customers). On the other hand, tech companies claim that meaningful data governance is challenging or impossible when accountability is demanded.

In this Article, we argue that tech companies systematically misrepresent or selectively ignore their data-governance capabilities. …

Privacy’S Autonomy Thicket: Disentangling Choice, Consent And Control, Jordan Francis, Woodrow Hartzog, Neil Richards

Faculty Scholarship

When it comes to talking about autonomy, privacy law could use a little clarity. Its discourse uses terms like “choice,” “consent,” and “control” to evoke autonomy, but these terms are too rarely defined and too often used interchangeably, even though they can mean very different things. The three terms have become entangled in a way that has become confusing and counterproductive. We call this problem “privacy’s autonomy thicket,” and it matters because it encourages talking past each other in policy debates, enabling the redefinition of these terms in misleading ways that produce weak and disempowering “notice and choice” regimes.

In …