Privacy Law and Theory Seminar

We live in an information age. Businesses, governments, and individuals are busy surveilling our lives, amassing, selling, and sharing our personal data for profit, control, or sport. Such surveillance isn’t new, though the stakes are higher than ever before and the threat landscape more varied and pervasive. We have been talking about the risks to privacy posed by the era’s new technologies since Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis wrote their famous article, “The Right to Privacy,” in 1890. That conversation grew with the prevalence of spy shops and miniature spying devices in the 1940s; the advent of computer “databanks,” “lie detector” tests, and government surveillance and extortion of journalists and civil rights activists in the 1960s-1970s; the advent of the commercial internet in the mid-1990s; and networked surveillance tools in our homes, phones, and everywhere we go in 2000s. Throughout the eras, we have been talking about what we mean by the concept of privacy, why matters to us as individuals, groups, and society, and how we ought to adapt to protect it. In this course, we will be reading great works of privacy law and theory, from (of course) the generative Warren and Brandeis article and Arthur Miller’s The Assault on Privacy and Anita Allen’s Uneasy Access to great new additions to the literature from Daniel Solove, Khiara Bridges, Julie Cohen, Sarah Igo, Neil Richards, Woody Hartzog, and Ari Waldman. The goal of the course is to give you a grounding in the theory of privacy law—our evolving conceptions of privacy and its necessity for a life of meaning and love.