Trends in Privacy Law

Catalog description

This course analyzes trends in the development of US constitutional, statutory, and tort law related to privacy from the 1890s to the present. In addition to court opinions and statutes, we will read scholarly commentary from law, social theory, and science and technology studies. Students will learn to recognize the range of privacy protections currently existing, their coverage, and their limits. In addition, students will discover that “privacy” is conceptualized in different ways, including spatial privacy, privacy as secrecy, and privacy as information control. This knowledge will allow them to recognize key concepts and terminology in contemporary privacy debates, and to intervene effectively in those debates.