I thoroughly enjoyed Jack Balkin’s Constitutional Redemption, and I found myself largely in agreement with many of Jack’s major claims. But overall, I find it hard to share his optimism.
At its core, Balkin’s constitutional jurisprudence is one founded upon faith — a faith in redemption. He concludes his book with the following paragraph (SPOILER ALERT):
In October, personal financial data — including social security numbers, loan repayment histories and bank-routing numbers – of thousands of college students was exposed on the Department of Education’s (ED) direct loan website. For seven minutes, anyone surfing the direct loan website could find personal information about students who had borrowed from the Department of Education.
Over at the Huffington Post, I have a short piece about the growing problems with student data. Here’s the opening:
Increasingly, states and school districts are struggling over how to deal with teachers who communicate with students online via social network websites. One foolish way to address the issue is via strict bans, such as a law passed in Missouri earlier this year that attempted to ban teachers from friending students on social network websites. Such laws are likely violations of the First Amendment right to freedom of speech and association, and I blogged at the Huffington Post that the law was unconstitutional. Soon thereafter, a court quickly struck down the law.
My article, The PII Problem: Privacy and a New Concept of Personally Identifiable Information (with Professor Paul Schwartz), is now out in print. You can download the final published version from SSRN. Here’s the abstract:
On Monday, December 5th, I’ll be speaking at a Future of Privacy Forum conference entitled “Personal Information: The Benefits and Risks of De-Identification.”
Facebook has settled with the FTC over its change to its privacy policies back in 2009. According to the FTC complaint, as summed up by the FTC press release, Facebook engaged in a number of unfair and deceptive trade practices:
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 practice of law.
A reader of my post about the N.Y. Times critique of legal education writes, in regard to the value of legal scholarship:
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 trashy paper.
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