Archive for the ‘Articles and Books’ Category
Louis Brandeis
posted by Gerard Magliocca
I
just finished Mel Urofsky’s new biography of Justice Brandeis and it’s terrific. I must admit (sheepishly) that I had never focused on Brandeis and his career before. The sweep of his achievements is truly astounding. I was especially fascinated by the discussion of his career in practice, as the judicial part is more accessible through his opinions.
My only quibble (a minor one in a book hundreds of pages long) is that no explanation is given for why Brandeis joined Holmes’ opinion in Buck v. Bell. Perhaps that is because no information exists on this point, but I would be curious to know whether Brandeis had any enthusiasm for eugenics or just went along because sterilization of the mentally retarded was an “experiment” in the states that deserved judicial deference.
BTW, I’m having Lasik tomorrow. Thus, I’ll be offline (hopefully not for long) until I heal up.
October 15, 2009 at 6:57 am
Posted in: Articles and Books
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Understanding Privacy in Paperback
posted by Daniel Solove
I’m pleased to announce that my book, Understanding Privacy, has just come out in paperback from Harvard University Press, with a price that’s much more reasonable and affordable than the hardcover.
Understanding Privacy offers a comprehensive overview of the many difficulties involved in discussions of privacy. Drawing from a broad array of interdisciplinary sources, I set forth a framework for understanding privacy that provides clear practical guidance for engaging with privacy issues.
September 14, 2009 at 7:36 am
Posted in: Articles and Books, Book Reviews, Privacy, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Privacy (Electronic Surveillance), Privacy (Gossip & Shaming), Privacy (ID Theft), Privacy (Law Enforcement), Privacy (Medical), Privacy (National Security)
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A Dispositive Defense of Student Law Reviews
posted by Dave Hoffman
There is no way that this would happen in a student journal. Delays? Sure. Bad edits? Absolutely. But this nonsense and collusion? I think not. Only non-lawyers would put up with this.
How to Publish a Scientific Comment in 1 2 3 Easy Steps
(H/T: Leiter.)
September 5, 2009 at 7:01 pm
Posted in: Articles and Books, Law School (Law Reviews), Law School (Scholarship)
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Concurring Opinions Book Reviews
posted by Daniel Solove
Sandy Levinson has a thoughtful new essay lamenting the dwindling number of book reviews of books about the law — The Vanishing Book Review in Student Edited Law Reviews and Potential Responses, 87 Tex. L. Rev. 1205 (2009). He discusses how the Michigan Law Review used to run 30 to 40 book reviews in its book review issue but now is running only about 10 to 15. He notes that among the top 20 law reviews, in 1987-88, they published about 125 reviews; in 2007-08, they published only 42 reviews.
Brian Leiter notes, in the title of his post about Levinson’s article, that “academic law needs more fora for serious book reviews.”
Beyond law reviews, the number of book reviews in newspapers is rapidly diminishing.
This is why we’re starting a new project at Concurring Opinions — we’ll serve as a forum for book reviews.
We will accept submissions from our readers — law professors, lawyers, law students, and academics in other fields are welcome to submit reviews.
The reviews we envision would be approximately the length of a New York Times book review — somewhere between 500 to 2000 words.
We will try to accept as many reviews as we can, but we will exercise editorial discretion if we think a review isn’t appropriate for our blog. We’re aiming for serious reviews.
If you’re interested in writing a book review for us, we recommend that you first email us with a brief description of what book you’d like to review and your background, as we don’t want you to go through the work of writing a review only for us to think it doesn’t fit with our blog. Emailing us in advance won’t guarantee acceptance, but we would hope to give you a good indication of whether we’d be interested in your review.
We believe that there’s a need for serious yet short book reviews, ones that aren’t as long as those published in law reviews. That’s why we’re starting this project. We expect it to be ongoing, so if you’ve read a law-related book recently and want a forum to publish your views about it, please think about doing a review for us.
If you publish a book review here, you keep copyright in your work, so you can use it, publish it, and disseminate it later in whatever way you desire.
So please email us if you’re interested.
August 18, 2009 at 7:21 pm
Posted in: Administrative Announcements, Articles and Books, Book Reviews, Law School (Law Reviews), Law School (Scholarship)
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The Revolution Won’t Be Kindled
posted by Dave Hoffman
Several weeks ago, I received the Kindle 2 as a gift. It was a good gift, since it promised to solve an increasingly serious problem of shelf space in the house. Like Josh Marshall and Joseph Jacobson before him, the minimalism promised by the Last Book project is more than a little seductive. Alternatively, I just want Penny’s book from the Inspector Gadget cartoon.
The Kindle has exceeded expectations in some ways. Most particularly, it has significantly increased the rate at which I buy second-tier fantasy and sci-fi books. As I hadn’t appreciated before, the delay in receiving such books, and shelf-space opportunities lost, together constituted a serious barrier to me buying more than one or two a month. (I had thought it was a mix of quality and constraints imposed by my need to write. Not so!) I’ve bought and read around twenty or so books this month, and ran through them all like a bag of mindlessly eaten doritos. I’d add fantasy to romance authors as folks who ought to send a little thank you card to Jeff Bezos this year.
But it many other ways, the Kindle has disappointed. In this issue of the New Yorker, Nicholson Baker attacks the Kindle mercilessly, on grounds which resonate: (i) ill-named (”cute and sinister at the same time”); (ii) bad keyboard (”a restaurant accordion.”); (iii) bad screen (” a greenish, sickly gray. A postmortem gray.”); (iv) bad catalog; (v) bad portability (”Nobody else’s hardware can handle Topaz without Amazon’s permission. That means you can’t read your Kindle books on your computer, or on an e-book reader that competes with the Kindle.”) But it’s an aspect of the reading experience he doesn’t mention that is particularly problematic.
The Kindle doesn’t reward – in fact it actively discourages – re-reading books. Part of that experience, at least for me, is linked to flipping through books for parts that were especially fun, or confusing, or interesting, and then diving in again. The Kindle, because it offers merely a continuous stream (you are 51% done, or you’ve completed 3400 of 5100 segments) doesn’t help to create the memory markers for those aspects of the book that are worth reliving.
Once you are done with a book on the Kindle, you never, ever, want to look at it again. You’ve absorbed the plot – it’s especially good, as Baker notes, at immersing you in plot-astic novels - but you haven’t gotten the artistry. And that’s why, I think, ultimately the Kindle (in its current form) isn’t going to destroy the book market. Reading on the Kindle is a materially inferior experience. And not just for law professors.
August 3, 2009 at 12:27 pm
Posted in: Articles and Books
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Best of Both Worlds: Now Online and In Print
posted by Danielle Citron
Of late, the academy has been wrestling with a number of publication trends, including the increasing prevalence of online writing. Many question whether blogging counts for tenure. Others debate the cachet of online journals.
An exciting development has emerged, one that serves as a bridge between the past and the present: the publication of shorter works online that later appear in print. For instance, the Washington University Law Review has just announced that in the fall, it will begin publishing concise scholarly pieces (approximately 2,500 words) online followed by publication in the print edition. Authors get the benefit of the law review’s excellent editorial feedback (I speak from experience) and a chance to write scholarly commentary that can find an audience quickly (as compared to the print process).
This allows scholars to enjoy the “best of both worlds.” Academics get the benefits of blogging (quick access to an interested audience) yet with more space to develop their ideas. They also enjoy publishing in an esteemed law review, which will generate more readers. It may even demonstrate that such writing has a place in a junior academic’s scholarly portfolio. Kudos–this is a valuable development for academic discourse.
July 30, 2009 at 8:15 am
Posted in: Articles and Books, Current Events
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Predicting Social Security Numbers from Public Data
posted by Daniel Solove
Alessandro Acquisti and Ralph Gross have recently published their provocative article, Predicting Social Security Numbers from Public Data in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. According to the abstract:
Information about an individual’s place and date of birth can be exploited to predict his or her Social Security number (SSN). Using only publicly available information, we observed a correlation between individuals’ SSNs and their birth data and found that for younger cohorts the correlation allows statistical inference of private SSNs. The inferences are made possible by the public availability of the Social Security Administration’s Death Master File and the widespread accessibility of personal information from multiple sources, such as data brokers or profiles on social networking sites. Our results highlight the unexpected privacy consequences of the complex interactions among multiple data sources in modern information economies and quantify privacy risks associated with information revelation in public forums.
Acquisti and Gross’s study has generated significant media attention. Here’s an article by Bob Sullivan for MSNBC and by Hadley Leggett for Wired. As Sullivan writes:
The two say they can guess the first 5 digits of the Social Security number of anyone born after 1988 within two guesses, knowing only birth date and location. The last four digits, while harder to guess, can be had within a few hundred guesses in many situations — a trivial hurdle for criminals using automated tools.
SSNs are currently used by numerous businesses and organizations to allow access to accounts – they function as a kind of password. They are also used to verify identity when people sign up for a new credit card or other account. They are thus a very useful tool for identity thieves and fraudsters who want to impersonate people to improperly access their accounts or obtain credit cards in their name.
The current focus of policymakers has been to provide better protections against the disclosure of SSNs.
Acquisti and Gross’s paper provides a powerful demonstration that protecting against the disclosure of SSNs is not providing enough protection to consumers. The article shows that no matter how much protection against the disclosure of SSNs, SSNs can be determined with other public information.
Congress or the FTC should prohibit companies from using SSNs as a means to verify identity. Companies, organizations, and government entities should be prohibited from using SSNs as a means of verifying identity to provide access to accounts or to create new accounts. Merely protecting against the disclosure of SSNs is insufficient since Acquisti and Gross demonstrate they can readily be predicted.
The government and businesses are at fault here. Too many business and organizations use the SSN improperly as a means to verify identity. And the government is at fault for creating the SSN and allowing it to be used improperly in ways that harm people.
July 6, 2009 at 8:41 pm
Posted in: Articles and Books, Privacy, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Privacy (ID Theft)
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Ethics and Government Lawyers Redux: Jeff Powell’s Happy Constitution
posted by Andrew Taslitz
In an earlier post, I noted that two recent books had important things to say relevant to the ethics of government lawyers. That first post reviewed one of those books. This post reviews the second, H. Jefferson Powell’s beautifully written and spiritually uplifting new book, Constitutional Conscience: The Moral Dimension of Judicial Decision (2008). Despite what the book’s title might suggest, Powell’s lessons concern the ethics that should guide all constitutional decisionmakers, not only government lawyers. Indeed, his lessons explicitly apply to such lawyers as well, including a chapter-length illustration. Here I simply summarize his ethical theory, leaving it to the reader to imagine applications.
I note one preliminary point: while much constitutional law scholarship is depressing, either foolishly pretending law to be a mechanical enterprise divorced from politics or a cynical one masking politics, Jeff Powell offers a third, happier way ignored by fools and cynics alike: that of virtue. Those embracing the first two approaches may see Powell’s way as hopelessly idealistic, but Powell himself sees it as highly realistic, and his extended examples, which I do not have space to recount here, strongly support the pragmatic viability of his suggestions. Read the rest of this post »
May 19, 2009 at 9:16 am
Posted in: Articles and Books, Book Reviews, Constitutional Law, Legal Ethics, Legal Theory, Politics, Supreme Court, Uncategorized
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Duke Law Journal Volume 58 April 2009
posted by Duke Law Journal
Volume 58 April 2009 Number 7
Foreword
Jeffrey M. Chemerinsky & Jonathan L. Williams
Introduction
“Only Connect”: Toward a Unified Measurement Project
David F. Levi & Mitu Gulati
Articles
Economic Trends and Judicial Outcomes: A Macrotheory of the Court
Thomas Brennan, Lee Epstein & Nancy Staudt
James J. Brudney & Corey Ditslear
Judicial Evaluations and Information Forcing: Ranking State High Courts and Their Judges
Stephen J. Choi, Mitu Gulati & Eric A. Posner
Frank B. Cross & Stefanie Lindquist
Remaking the United States Supreme Court in the Courts’ of Appeals Image
Tracey E. George & Chris Guthrie
The “Hidden Judiciary”: An Empirical Examination of Executive Branch Justice
Chris Guthrie, Jeffrey J. Rachlinski & Andrew J. Wistrich
Are Empiricists Asking the Right Questions about Judicial Decisionmaking?
Jack Knight
J. Mark Ramseyer
Are Appointed Judges Strategic Too?
Joanna M. Shepherd
May 12, 2009 at 7:27 pm
Posted in: Articles and Books, Law Rev (Duke), Uncategorized
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Lawrence Friedman and the History of Privacy
posted by Neil Richards
I recently uploaded to SSRN a short review essay of Lawrence Friedman’s “Guarding Life’s Dark Secrets: Legal and Social Controls over Reputation, Propriety and Privacy (Stanford 2007). No book is perfect, but this one is probably the best book on the history of privacy law that I have read.
Here’s the abstract of my review:
A short review essay of Lawrence Friedman’s “Guarding Life’s Dark Secrets: Legal and Social Controls over Reputation, Propriety, and Privacy” (Stanford Press 2007). The essay argues that Friedman tells a nuanced and compelling story of the rise and fall of the “Victorian Compromise,” a series of interlocking legal doctrines protecting the reputations of elites around the turn of the twentieth century. “Dark Secrets” undeniably advances our understanding of both the genesis of privacy law and the relationships between law and culture in the Gilded Age. As a work of legal history, it is an instant classic – a must-read for anyone interested in privacy law. But although Dark Secrets is first-rate legal history, it is less successful in its latter chapters when Friedman shifts his focus from the past to the present. The limits of Friedman’s social criticism raise important questions about the ability of history alone to provide answers to social problems in our modern, networked information society.
May 7, 2009 at 8:42 am
Posted in: Articles and Books, Book Reviews, Cyberlaw, History of Law, Law and Humanities, Privacy
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Privilege or Punish: Criminal Justice and the Challenge of Family Ties
posted by Jennifer Collins
I am really happy to announce that my book with Dan Markel and Ethan Leib, Privilege or Punish: Criminal Justice and the Challenge of Family Ties, is now officially out and available at Amazon and at Oxford University Press’s website. If you are interested in obtaining a copy at a discount from the quite high cover price (the high price of law books is a topic for a blog post in itself!), check out Dan’s post on Prawfs about the book for some suggestions.
In related news, there will be a roundtable on the book at Law and Society in May featuring Melissa Murray, Alice Ristroph, Don Braman, Tommy Crocker, and Naomi Cahn. Additionally, there will be another panel at SEALS in August. Last, there will be a Feature on the book in the Yale Law Journal sometime next year, which will include a handful of essays from a number of folks, as well as a piece by us, tentatively titled, Rethinking Criminal Justice and Family Status. We will have more info on these panels and discussions in the coming weeks. There are many people who helped make this book possible, and we are profoundly grateful for their assistance and encouragement. I also want to give a shout-out to my wonderful co-authors Dan and Ethan — working with them on this project has truly been an amazing experience (indeed, the benefits of co-authoring can be the subject for yet another blog post!)
April 28, 2009 at 12:00 pm
Posted in: Articles and Books
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Lessons from the Identity Trail
posted by Daniel Solove
There’s a terrific new book of essays about privacy out from Oxford University Press — LESSONS FROM THE IDENTITY TRAIL: ANONYMITY, PRIVACY AND IDENTITY IN A NETWORKED SOCIETY (Oxford University Press 2009). It’s edited by Ian Kerr, Valerie Steeves, and Carole Lucock. The essays are fascinating and are written by a number of very prominent privacy scholars. Highly recommended!
The book is available free for download under a Creative Commons license. One third of the essays are now posted online. The rest will become available in two more stages — on April 22th and May 6th. This is the first book to be published by Oxford University Press under a Creative Commons license.
The book is available on Amazon.com or on our special Concurring Opinions Oxford University Press promo page for 20% off.
Here’s the table of contents:
April 8, 2009 at 10:01 pm
Posted in: Anonymity, Articles and Books, Book Reviews, Privacy, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Privacy (ID Theft), Privacy (Law Enforcement), Privacy (Medical)
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John Bingham
posted by Gerard Magliocca
After I finish my book on Populist and Progressive era constitutionalism, my next book will be a biography of John Bingham (1815-1900), the principal drafter of Section One of the Fourteenth Amendment. It’s a bit daunting, as I’ve never written a biography before and much of the relevant material is scattered around the country. Nevertheless, given his importance (Hugo Black called Bingham the “James Madison of the Fourteenth Amendment”), he really deserves a full-fledged biography (not to mention an HBO miniseries, if anyone wants to buy the rights from me). There was one written by Erving Beauregard about twenty years ago, but it is pretty obscure and was based on an inaccurate view of Bingham’s role that dates back to Charles Fairman’s flawed scholarship in the 1940s.
April 8, 2009 at 12:45 pm
Posted in: Articles and Books, History of Law
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Rent-seeking in Fantasy World
posted by Dave Hoffman
Last week, Josh Marshall at TPM had a great post about the future of books in the post-Kindle world. After a generally positive review of the gadget, Josh wrote:
[L]ast night, sitting in front of [my books], I had this dark epiphany. How much longer are these things going to be around? . . . The few hundred or so I was looking at suddenly seemed like they were taking up an awful lot of space, like the whole business could dealt with a lot more cleanly and efficiently, if at some moral loss.Don’t get me wrong. Book books still have some clear advantages. Kindle is a disaster with pictures and maps. But I didn’t realize the book might move so rapidly into the realm of endangered modes of distributing the written word. I was thinking maybe decades more. The book is so tactile and personal and much less ephemeral than the sort of stuff we read online.
I hope it’s clear that I don’t view this as a good thing or something I welcome. When I had the realization I described above it felt like a sock in the gut, if perhaps a fillip on the interior decorating front. All the business model and joblessnes stuff aside, that’s how I feel about physical newspapers too. There’s a lot I miss about print newspapers, particularly the serendipitous magic of finding stories adjacent to the one you’re reading, articles you’re deeply interested in but never would have known you were if it weren’t plopped down in front of you to pull you in through your peripheral vision. Yet at this point I probably read a print newspaper only a handful of times a year.
I don’t have a Kindle, but I’ve been thinking about this passage over the last week. It’s certainly true that there’s something reassuring about having lots of books in a room, but I suspect Josh is right that their day is ending. And this is probably for the best. My books weigh me down: they make me less flexible about traveling, they take up space in the house, they are hugely expensive, and they are inefficient.
Consider as an illustrative example Tor Book’s decision to split the final volume of Robert Jordan’s fantasy series into three books, to be released over time, presumably in hard- and soft-covers, followed by a definitive volume reintegrating them. Tor’s stated reason is that the final book has become too big to bind. (And the author of the book, who took over when Jordan died, offers his own self-serving justification here.) But it’s obvious (to me, at least) that Tor is simply seeking to extract more rent from fans of the series, who, having waited for years for the final installment of the series, and invested the time reading the eleven books to date, are now as captive an audience as you’re likely to see. Thankfully, his kind of behavior would be much more difficult to justify in a world of digital books. Bring on the revolution.
April 6, 2009 at 1:25 pm
Posted in: Articles and Books, Intellectual Property, Science Fiction
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The Bard of the Financial Crisis
posted by Nate Oman
Over the weekend, I re-read A Merchant of Venice, and I was struck by the fact that Shakespeare manages to include in the play virtually every element of the current financial crisis. Scene one begins with a discussion of risk assessment, and Antonio’s belief that he has managed to tame the vagaries of commercial fate through diversification. Asked by Salarino if he “Is sad to think upon his merchandise” (I.i.40), Antonio responds:
Believe me, no. I thank my fortune for it
My ventures are not in one bottom trusted,
Nor to one place; nor is my whole estate
Upon the fortune of this present year.
Therefore my merchandise makes me not sad. (I.i.41-45)
Having ignored the problem of fat tails and black swans, Antonio decides to engage in a bit of dodgy finance. He borrows in the wholesale market from Shylock under terms that appear favorable, but have a huge downside in the unlikely event of his default. Antonio, of course, is unconcerned. From his point of view he is getting cheap money by taking on what seems like an extremely remote risk. He then takes these borrowed funds and uses them to make what can only be described as a no doc, subprime loan. Bassiano wants money for a speculative venture — the wooing “In Belmont [of] a lady richly left” (I.i.161) — and Antonio agrees, in effect renting out his credit rating:
Try what my credit in Venice can do;
That shall be racked even to the uttermost
To furnish thee to Belmont to fair Portia.
Go presently inquire, and so will I,
Where money is; and I no question make
To have it of my trust or for my sake. (I.i.180-185)
Shylock, for his part, does not approve of the loose monetary policy in Venice, which he rightly blames on wild lending practices, such as Antonio’s loans:
How like a fawning publican he looks.I hate him for he is a Christian;
But more, for what is low simplicity,
He lends out money gratis and brings down
The rate of usance here with us in Venice. (I.iii.38-42)
March 24, 2009 at 11:33 am
Posted in: Articles and Books, Bankruptcy, Behavioral Law and Economics, Consumer Protection Law, Contract Law & Beyond, Current Events, History of Law, Humor, Law and Humanities
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Rethinking Free Speech and Civil Liability
posted by Daniel Solove
When does civil liability for speech trigger First Amendment protections?
Recently, Professor Neil Richards and I posted on SSRN our new article exploring this question: Rethinking Free Speech and Civil Liability, 109 Columbia Law Review (forthcoming 2009).
Surprising, the issue of when civil liability for speech triggers First Amendment scrutiny is governed by two totally contradictory rules. Since New York Times v. Sullivan, the First Amendment applies to tort liability for speech, including defamation and invasion of privacy.
But in other contexts, the First Amendment does not apply to liability for speech. According to Cohen v. Cowles, there is no First Amendment scrutiny for speech restricted by promissory estoppel and contract. The First Amendment rarely requires scrutiny when property rules restrict speech.
In a large range of situations, however, these rules collide. Tort, contract, and property law overlap to a substantial degree, so formalistic distinctions between areas of law will not adequately resolve when the First Amendment should apply to civil liability.
This conflict is vividly illustrated by the law of confidentiality. We pose the following hypothetical in the article:
Suppose an attorney representing a client in a highly-publicized case discloses the client’s confidential information. The client sues under the breach of confidentiality tort. The attorney claims that she was engaging in free speech and that the First Amendment protects her right of expression. Does the Sullivan or Cohen rule apply? One could argue that the Sullivan rule applies because breach of confidentiality is a tort. On the other hand, breach of confidentiality remedies a contract-like harm. Even if never expressed orally or in writing, an implicit agreement exists between the attorney and client that the attorney will maintain the confidentiality of the client’s information. Perhaps this situation should fall under the Cohen rule because the breach of confidentiality claim more closely resembles an action for promissory estoppel rather than an action for public disclosure of private facts. If this were the case, then the First Amendment would not apply.
In our article, we explore how this problem can be resolved. We survey the way that existing doctrine and theories attempt to address the conflict between the Sullivan and Cohen rules, and we demonstrate why such approaches are lacking. We aim to develop a coherent approach for resolving when the First Amendment applies to civil liability for speech. To find out our solution, take a look at our article and let us know what you think.
March 17, 2009 at 11:59 am
Posted in: Articles and Books, Constitutional Law, Contract Law & Beyond, First Amendment, Media Law, Privacy, Privacy (Gossip & Shaming), Tort Law
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What Are You Doing Over Spring Break?
posted by Darian Ibrahim
I’m writing a new article. And having a blast (seriously). It’s a great feeling to hit a groove with a new idea. Hope whatever you’re doing this week or next, you enjoy it.
March 16, 2009 at 10:12 am
Posted in: Articles and Books
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BRIGHT IDEAS: Timothy Zick on Speech Out of Doors
posted by Daniel Solove
Professor Timothy Zick (William & Mary College of Law) has written a superb new book, Speech Out of Doors: Preserving First Amendment Liberties in Public Places (Cambridge, 2008). Tim has guest blogged with us on a few occasions, and his book raises interesting and important free speech issues involving speech in various places where people commonly gather. I asked Tim a few questions about his new book, and his answers are below.
SOLOVE: What motivated you to write about the issues in your book?
ZICK: I first became interested in the subject of spatial restrictions on speech when I witnessed how protesters and other public speakers were treated in New York City (and elsewhere), particularly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Of course, limits on public expression preceded these events. But the trend toward regulating public dissent and other forms of public expression through control over place increased markedly thereafter. Of the many limits placed on public expression, it was the “speech cage” erected at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston that really captured my attention. A district court judge described the structure, which was constructed as a purported “demonstration zone,” as an “internment camp” and “an affront to the First Amendment.” As did others, I found it remarkable that this repressive tactic was being used to regulate public expression in the United States. As or even more remarkable to me was that the courts held the Boston speech cage satisfied First Amendment standards.
SOLOVE: What’s the central idea in your book?
ZICK: I have always felt that the “public forum” and other First Amendment doctrines relating to place fail to appreciate some fundamental aspects of place itself, and of the intersection of place and expression. Anthropologists, geographers, philosophers, and other scholars who are closely attentive to the concept of place have demonstrated how important spatiality is to human interaction and communication, as well as to the state’s control over public contention. Through this lens, I posit in the book that place is not merely a property or “forum.” In many cases, places are distinctly expressive. They form part of an “expressive topography” – a system of places in which a variety of speech activities and contests occur. For example, beggars, proselytizers, and their potential audiences interact in embodied places (personal space); protesters often target specific contested places; and large rallies are held in inscribed places like the National Mall. Speech and spatiality intersect in unique ways in each of these and other spatial types identified in the book. For a variety of reasons, including the increasing privatization of public space, legal restrictions on public speech and assembly, and repressive forms of public policing, our expressive topography has been steadily eroding. This has negatively affected nearly every corner of the expressive topography, from public parks to college and university campuses.
SOLOVE: You write about the diminishing public space for speech. In an age where people increasingly spend their time at home in front of their computers rather than milling about on the public square, what’s the significance of the increasing loss of public space for speech?
January 14, 2009 at 11:29 am
Posted in: Articles and Books, Book Reviews, Bright Ideas, First Amendment
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The Year in Privacy Books: 2008
posted by Daniel Solove
Here’s a list of notable books about information privacy published in 2008. Pick up a few to help stimulate the economy, save the publishing business, and learn more about privacy:
Colin J. Bennett, The Privacy Advocates: Resisting the Spread of Surveillance (MIT Press 2008)
A very informative account of those who work in the privacy advocacy community.
A great collection of essays, from a symposium at Stanford Law School. A bit dated — the symposium was held in 2003 — but still worth reading. I have a piece in the book discussing data security vulnerabilities and the law — originally penned back in 2003, so I can say “told ya so!”
The best and most comprehensive intellectual history of the Fourth Amendment ever written.
Cory Doctorow, Little Brother (Tor Teen 2008)
A contemporary version of Orwell’s 1984 — thought-provoking and engaging fiction, as usual from Doctorow.
December 27, 2008 at 1:54 pm
Posted in: Articles and Books, Book Reviews, Privacy, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Privacy (Electronic Surveillance), Privacy (Gossip & Shaming), Privacy (Law Enforcement), Privacy (National Security)
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William Cuddihy’s The Fourth Amendment: Origins and Original Meaning 602-1791
posted by Daniel Solove
I’m delighted to announce the publication of William J. Cuddihy’s The Fourth Amendment: Origins and Original Meaning 602 – 1791 (Oxford University Press, January 2009). The book has just come out in print, hot off the press, and it’s an absolutely essential volume for any scholar of constitutional history, criminal procedure, or the Fourth Amendment.
Cuddihy’s book is the most comprehensive history of the Fourth Amendment I’ve ever read. It spans over 1000 years of history, tracing the origins of the concepts underpinning the Fourth Amendment from the Middle Ages to the Founding. It clocks in at 940 pages, but much of the heft comes from the extensive footnoting and detailed appendices. The book it is highly readable and contains a wealth of information and insight into the intellectual history of the Fourth Amendment and its original meaning. It comes with a high price tag, but I can assure you that it’s worth every penny.
I first encountered the book as an unpublished manuscript (which was completed over 15 years ago) when I was doing research into the history of the Fourth Amendment. I kept seeing it cited in articles and judicial opinions (it was cited by the U.S. Supreme Court a few times) and so I tracked it down. I couldn’t believe that this detailed, exhaustive, and immensely valuable research had never been published. William Cuddihy wrote it while a doctoral student under the late eminent legal historian Leonard Levy. I contacted Cuddihy and helped him find a publisher. And so I’m delighted that the manuscript is now in print, revised, updated, and with an afterward that responds to scholarship by Akhil Amar and Thomas Davies. I wrote a short preface for the book, in which I conclude:
No other work on the Fourth Amendment has synthesized so many sources, let alone done so as deftly and clearly as Professor Cuddihy’s The Fourth Amendment: Origins and Original Meaning 602-1791. I am very honored to introduce it.
Get your copy today. Tell your librarian to get a copy for your school’s library. It’s truly an impressive book, and is indispensable for anyone who wants to understand the origins of the Fourth Amendment.
December 18, 2008 at 6:41 pm
Posted in: Articles and Books, Book Reviews, Constitutional Law, Criminal Procedure, History of Law, Privacy, Privacy (Law Enforcement)
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