I can’t help but note that there are quite a few cases on the U.S. Supreme Court calendar involving privacy law:
The U.S. Supreme Court and Privacy Law
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Rationalizing Law
For quite a long time, extensive empirical work in psychology, sociology, and behavioral economics has been revealing that many of the law’s most cherished rules are faulty. They are based upon mistaken assumptions about human behavior. They are often flat out wrong. And yet they persist.
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Unmasking a Judge’s Anonymity: Saffold v. Plain Dealer Publishing Co.
In a very interesting case, Saffold v. Plain Dealer Publishing Co., a state court judge (Shirley Strickland Saffold) is suing the Cleveland Plan Dealer for stating that comments posted on the newspaper’s website under the screen name “lawmiss” originated from a computer used by the judge and/or her daughter. Some of these comments related to cases before Judge Saffold.
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Chief Justice Roberts and Legal Scholarship
In response to questions after giving a speech, Chief Justice Roberts expressed how he generally ignores legal scholarship. According to the WSJ Blog:
Roberts said he doesn’t pay much attention to academic legal writing. Law review articles are “more abstract” than practical, and aren’t “particularly helpful for practitioners and judges.”
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How Identity Theft Is Like the Ford Pinto
Professor James Grimmelmann likes to shop at Kohl’s. So much so that he applied for credit at Kohl’s. And he got it.
The problem is that James Grimmelmann didn’t really apply for anything. It was an identity thief.Continue Reading
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Robert Morse’s Response on the US News Law School Rankings
Over at WSJ Blog, Ashby Jones contacted Robert Morse to get his reaction to my post about how raters should fill out the US News law school rankings forms:
We caught up with Bob Morse, the director of data services for U.S. News, who said in his estimation, the 1-5 options generally speaking matched up with the level of knowledge held by the raters. “We’ve felt that the level of judgment isn’t granular enough to provide a wider scale.”
He also said that because the survey reports the results of the reputation question out to the tenths place, “we’re actually publishing it on a scale of 50; the results average out to be more granular.”
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The Best Privacy Blog
For quite some time, I’ve been relying on the blog Pogo Was Right to keep up to date on privacy news.
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How to Fill Out the US News Law School Rankings Form
Every year, US News compiles its law school rankings by relying heavily on reputation ratings by law professors (mainly deans and associate deans) and practitioners and judges. They are asked to assign a score (from 1 to 5) for the roughly 200 law schools on the form. A 5 is the highest score and a 1 is the lowest. While many factors that go into the US News ranking have been criticized, the reputation ratings by and large are considered one of the best components in the ranking system. But should it be?
Let’s assume a knowledgeable dean filling out the form in good faith. How is he or she to go about filling out the form?
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Data Security: When Will the Thick Skulls Learn?
The Wall Street Journal reports the theft of 3.3 million student loan records, including Social Security numbers:
Company and federal officials said they believed last week’s theft of identity data on 3.3 million people with student loans was the largest-ever breach of such information and could affect as many as 5% of all federal student-loan borrowers.
Names, addresses, Social Security numbers and other personal data on borrowers were stolen from the St. Paul, Minn., headquarters of Educational Credit Management Corp., a nonprofit guarantor of federal student loans, during the weekend of March 20-21, according to the company.
ECMC said the stolen information was on a portable media device. “It was simple, old-fashioned theft,” said ECMC spokesman Paul Kelash. “It was not a hacker incident.”
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The SeaWorld Killer Whale Death Video and the Right to Privacy
Jessica Bennett at Newsweek brought my attention to a story about the family of the killer whale trainer (Dawn Brancheau) who was killed while training the whale at SeaWorld:
Brancheau’s family announced this week that they would seek an injunction to protect the release of the death imagery, captured by SeaWorld’s surveillance cameras on Feb. 24. And though the video has not yet been publicly released, it’s presently in the hands of the Florida Orange County Sheriff’s Office, which is investigating the woman’s death.
According to FoxNews:
The Orange County Sheriff’s Office, who now has the video, has received several calls from sources trying to obtain copies of the video, the Orlando Sentinel reported.Once the Orange County Sheriff’s Office concludes its investigation, the material would become public under Florida law. . . .
Brancheau’s family said through a spokesman that public airing of the killing would only worsen their grief.They could seek a court injunction to stop the release, at least temporarily. The family has been consulting the lawyer who represented Dale Earnhardt’s widow in a court fight over his autopsy photos.
I believe that the Brancheau family has a good case. They want to prevent the sad events that happened to the family of Nikki Catsouras, whose gruesome accident death photos started appearing all over the Internet. In that case, the court held that the family could bring common law privacy claims against the police department for improperly leaking the photographs.
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