PRIVACY + SECURITY BLOG

News, Developments, and Insights

The Relationship Between Theory and Practice

The longstanding attacks on legal scholarship all seem to assume a particular relationship between theory and practice, one that I believe is flawed.  Recently, I responded to one such critique.  There are others, with Justice Roberts and many other judges and practitioners claiming that legal scholarship isn’t worth their attention and isn’t useful to the […]

On the New York Times and Legal Education

Much has already been written about David Segal’s article in the N.Y. Times, What They Don’t Teach Law Students: Lawyering.  I join the strong critiques of this piece in condemning it as a lousy piece of journalism — more of a one-sided hack job, riddled with errors.  It belongs on the op-ed page of a […]

J.K Rowling, Defamation and Privacy Law, and the Chilling of the Media

A common argument made to justify First Amendment restrictions on privacy torts and defamation law is that legal liability will chill the media.  I am generally sympathetic to these arguments, though only to a point.  I think these arguments are often overblown.  An interesting point of comparison is the UK, where there is a much […]

United States v. Jones and GPS Surveillance

The Supreme Court has long held that there is no expectation of privacy in public for the purposes of the Fourth Amendment.  Because the Fourth Amendment turns on the existence of a reasonable expectation of privacy, the Court’s logic means that the Fourth Amendment provides no protection to surveillance in public.  In United States v. Jones, the […]

An Interview with Lior Strahilevitz about Information and Exclusion

Lior Strahilevitz, Deputy Dean and Sidley Austin Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School recently published a brilliant new book, Information and Exclusion (Yale University Press 2011).  Like all of Lior’s work, the book is creative, thought-provoking, and compelling.  There are books that make strong and convincing arguments, and these are good, […]

Rethinking the Concept of “Personally Identifiable Information” (PII)

Professor Paul Schwartz (Berkeley Law School) and I have just posted our new article to SSRN: The PII Problem: Privacy and a New Concept of Personally Identifiable Information, 86 N.Y.U. L. Rev. — (forthcoming Nov. 2011).  Here’s the abstract:

GPS Surveillance and the Fourth Amendment: Thoughts on United States v. Jones

In United States v. Jones, FBI agents installed a GPS tracking device on Jones’ car and monitored where he drove for a month without a warrant.  Jones challenged the warrantless GPS surveillance as a violation of the Fourth Amendment.  The D.C. Circuit agreed with Jones.

New Details in the Tyler Clementi Cyberbullying Case

There are some new details emerging in the Tyler Clementi cyberbullying case at Rutgers. The case involves freshmen at Rutgers University. Dharun Ravi used a webcam to film and broadcast online an intimate encounter between his roommate Tyler Clementi and another man.