I am very happy to announce the publication of my new book, UNDERSTANDING PRIVACY (Harvard University Press, May 2008). There has been a longstanding struggle to understand what “privacy” means and why it is valuable. Professor Arthur Miller once wrote that privacy is “exasperatingly vague and evanescent.” In this book, I aim to develop a clear and accessible theory of privacy, one that will provide useful guidance for law and policy. From the book jacket:
Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, David Post and Orin Kerr are debating Post’s experiment of having students read unedited judicial opinions in his classes. Kerr writes that the skill of locating the relevant material in a case is a skill that is learned through all types of reading. Post counters that “a critical part of becoming a lawyer is being able to read through a long document – and not any old long document, but a very particular kind of long document, a ‘judicial opinion’ – to ‘find the relevant section.’”
Last week brought the unfortunate news that Lori Drew was indicted for a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for her ill-conceived hoax on Megan Meier. According to an MSNBC article:
I’ve blogged about the Megan Meier case a while ago. This is the case where Megan Meier, a teenager, committed suicide after her online friend from Myspace suddenly started to reject her and say mean things to her. The “friend” on Myspace was actually Lori Drew, the mother of one of her classmates, and some other individuals. They created the fake profile and were pretending to be Meier’s fictional friend.
Over at Convictions and Balkinization, Orin Kerr and Jack Balkin are having an interesting discussion about Justice Scalia’s constitutionalism versus liberal constitutionalism.
There’s an interesting discussion going on over at Balkinization about whether theories of interpretation matter. For example, see the posts of Brian Tamanaha and Sandy Levinson.
Professor Todd Henderson (U. Chicago Law School) has posted an interesting article on SSRN, Citing Fiction, 11 Green Bag 2d 171 (2008). He provides many illuminating facts about judges citing literary works:
My short essay, Data Mining and the Security-Liberty Debate, 74 U. Chi. L. Rev. 343 (2008) has just been published. I’ve posted the final version on SSRN. You can find the abstract and more information about the essay in a previous post I wrote about the subject here.
The essay critiques arguments by Richard Posner and William Stuntz, as well as Eric Posner and Adrian Vermeule’s Terror in the Balance: Security, Liberty, and the Courts.
Originally Posted at Concurring Opinions
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This post was authored by Professor Daniel J. Solove, who through TeachPrivacy develops computer-based privacy training, data security training, HIPAA training, and many other forms of awareness training on privacy and security topics. Professor Solove also posts at his blog at LinkedIn. His blog has more than 1 million followers.
Professor Solove is the organizer, along with Paul Schwartz, of the Privacy + Security Forum and International Privacy + Security Forum, annual events designed for seasoned professionals.
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A recent NY Times article discusses how the police are increasingly collecting DNA samples from suspects — not with warrants or probable cause — they are gathering it surreptitiously from the abandoned DNA that people leave behind:
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (en banc) has just issued a very interesting opinion interpreting a federal law providing immunity from liability for online speech — the Communications Decency Act (CDA), 47 U.S.C. § 230. The case is Fair Housing Council v. Roommates.com, LLC, 2008 WL 879293 (9th Cir. April 3, 2008) (en banc).