First Amendment: Speech Recent Case

Doe v. Harris

Ninth Circuit Upholds Preliminary Injunction Barring Enforcement of California Requirement that Sex Offenders Provide Notice of Internet Identifiers and Service Providers to Law Enforcement.

Vol. 128 No. 7
Internet & Communications Law Article

Toward a Positive Theory of Privacy Law

Vol. 126 No. 7 Privacy protections create winners and losers. So does the absence of privacy protections. The distributive implications of governmental decisions regarding privacy are often very significant, but they can be subtle too. Policy and academic debates over privacy rules tend not to emphasize the distributive dimensions of those rules, and many privacy advocates mistakenly believe that all consumers and voters win when privacy is enhanced. At the same time, privacy skeptics who do discuss privacy in distributive terms sometimes score cheap rhetorical points by suggesting that only those with shameful secrets to hide benefit from privacy protections. Neither approach is appealing, and privacy scholars ought to do better.
Foreign & Comparative Law Article

The EU-U.S. Privacy Collision: A Turn to Institutions and Procedures

Vol. 126 No. 7 Internet scholarship in the United States generally concentrates on how decisions made in this country about copyright law, network neutrality, and other policy areas shape cyberspace. In one important aspect of the evolving Internet, however, a comparative focus is indispensable. Legal forces outside the United States have significantly shaped the governance of information privacy, a highly important aspect of cyberspace, and one involving central issues of civil liberties.
Privacy Article

The Dangers of Surveillance

Vol. 126 No. 7 From the Fourth Amendment to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and from the Electronic Communications Privacy Act to films like Minority Report and The Lives of Others, our law and culture are full of warnings about state scrutiny of our lives. These warnings are commonplace, but they are rarely very specific. Other than the vague threat of an Orwellian dystopia, as a society we don’t really know why surveillance is bad and why we should be wary of it. To the extent that the answer has something to do with “privacy,” we lack an understanding of what “privacy” means in this context and why it matters. We’ve been able to live with this state of affairs largely because the threat of constant surveillance has been relegated to the realms of science fiction and failed totalitarian states.
Privacy Article

What Privacy is For

Vol. 126 No. 7 Privacy has an image problem. Over and over again, regardless of the forum in which it is debated, it is cast as old-fashioned at best and downright harmful at worst – antiprogressive, overly costly, and inimical to the welfare of the body politic. Privacy advocates resist this framing but seem unable either to displace it or to articulate a comparably urgent description of privacy’s importance. No single meme or formulation of privacy’s purpose has emerged around which privacy advocacy might coalesce. Pleas to “balance” the harms of privacy invasion against the asserted gains lack visceral force.