Archive for the ‘Articles and Books’ Category

Links and short thoughts on Amazonfail

posted by Kaimipono D. Wenger

Deven has already mentioned Amazonfail, in which Amazon temporarily delisted all MacMillan books — one-sixth of its inventory — because of a disagreement over Kindle pricing. (MacMillan was tired of Amazon using its books as a loss leader to get folks to buy Kindles).

It’s been interesting to read over folks’ analyses. The best overview comes from Scalzi, who lists seven ways that this was a complete fail on Amazon’s part. There’s also very good analysis from Cory Doctorow; another very good analysis from Tobias Bucknell; yet another very good analysis from Scott Westerfield (and there are more good analyses out there); a funny photoshopped picture at Engadget; and of course calls for revolution from a variety of folks, such as Tobias Bucknell.

At the end of the day, I’m thinking that the critics were right. Amazon apparently can’t be trusted not to do really stupid things, which may seriously harm readers and authors (and publishers with whom Amazon is squabbling). Amazon’s move was really stupid, and puts a major dent in their credibility. I can’t speak for everyone, but I can say that I read a variety of MacMillan titles, and I own a Kindle — and following this whole kerfuffle, I’m seriously thinking about Apple’s new feminine-products device.

February 6, 2010 at 3:52 pm Posted in: Amazon, Articles and Books, Technology Print This Post One Comment

Book Review: Divergent Opinions: Why Community Matters — A Review of Sunstein’s Going to Extremes

posted by Marc Roark

Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide, by Cass Sunstein. Oxford University Press: New York 2009. Pp. 171. $21.95

Cass Sunstein argues in his new book Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide that extremism is a phenomenon that is enhanced when people of like minds get together to talk. When we think of people that lie at the extremes of society, our minds are often drawn to reclusive characters. People like John the Baptist living in the wilderness “wearing clothes made of camel hair, eating locusts and wild honey;” (Matt. 3:3-4) or people like Raskolnikov from Fydor Doystoyveski’s Crime and Punishment – a reclusive character who develops a radical and warped sense of morality in response to his perception of society’s values. In reality, people that live on the extremes are rarely alone. They are surrounded by a network of like thinkers who confirm the attitudes, beliefs and interpretations of sensory data that those persons embrace as normal. Extremes are about information. That is, where you get your information from; whether you believe that information to be reliable, and how willing you are to accept information outside of your preferred source.

Going to Extremes is about how, when and why extremes develop in communities. The theme of the book is that “[w]hen people find themselves in groups of like-minded types they are especially likely to move to extremes” (p. 2). Sunstein’s work fits into the genre of human behavioral psychology proposed by James Sidanius and others that views extremists’ cognitive complexity as more complex than moderates. See James Sidanius, Functioning Sociopolitical Ideology Revisted, 6 POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY 637, 639 (1985). This is in contrast to extremism theory, which largely assumes that political extremists display less-sophisticated cognitive behavior than moderates. About the form of extremism we call terrorism, Sunstein writes at one point,

it is tempting to think that terrorism is a product of extreme poverty, lack of education, or a kind of mental illness. It turns out that all of these thoughts are quite wrong. Most of the time, [terrorists] come from middle-income families. Nor have terrorists lacked education. There is no evidence that they suffer from mental illness…. Alan Krueger argues that terrorism is a form of political protest, and those who lack civil rights and civil liberties not having other means of engaging in protest resort to terrorism. To Krueger’s point, we might add that when civil liberties do not exist citizens have only one prominent source of information – the state – and that source cannot be trusted. (p. 115)

Terrorism then becomes a reaction against information that the extreme positions assume can’t be right. Thus, in Sunstein’s work, the why and how of extremisms (like terrorism) can be associated with how individuals interact in communities – the trust they place in the information received, the confidence they derive from like-minded members, and the authority or submission they respond to as a member of the community.

Read the rest of this post »

February 4, 2010 at 12:09 am Posted in: Articles and Books, Behavioral Law and Economics, Book Reviews, Law and Humanities, Law and Psychology, Philosophy of Social Science, Politics, Sociology of Law Print This Post One Comment

Free Review Copies of Princeton University Press Books

posted by Daniel Solove

I’m very pleased to announce the continued expansion of our book review project. In addition to Oxford, Cambridge, and Harvard, Princeton University Press will now offer free review copies to our blog readers who agree to write a book review. Please email your proposals to me.

To read some previous book reviews, along with book-related posts, please visit our book review archive page.

Here are some recent titles in law/politics by Princeton University Press:

* James Bessen & Michael J. Meurer, Patent Failure: How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk

* Derek Bok, The Politics of Happiness: What Government Can Learn from the New Research on Well-Being

* James L. Gibson & Gregory A. Caldeira, Citizens, Courts, and Confirmations: Positivity Theory and the Judgments of the American People

* Kent Greenawalt, Religion and the Constitution, Volume 1: Free Exercise and Fairness

* Kent Greenawalt, Religion and the Constitution, Volume 2: Establishment and Fairness

* Mark A. R. Kleiman, When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment

* Jonathan R. Macey, Corporate Governance: Promises Kept, Promises Broken

* Daniel Markovits, A Modern Legal Ethics: Adversary Advocacy in a Democratic Age

* Andrei Marmor, Social Conventions: From Language to Law

* Eric A. Posner & David Weisbach, Climate Change Justice

* Steven H. Shiffrin, The Religious Left and Church-State Relations

* Cass R. Sunstein, A Constitution of Many Minds: Why the Founding Document Doesn’t Mean What It Meant Before

* Cass R. Sunstein, Republic.com 2.0

* Brian Z. Tamanaha, Beyond the Formalist-Realist Divide: The Role of Politics in Judging

* Steven M. Teles, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law

* Mark Tushnet, Weak Courts, Strong Rights: Judicial Review and Social Welfare Rights in Comparative Constitutional Law

Feel free to propose a review of any of the above books or any other recent books in Princeton University Press’s catalog.

Please email your proposals to me.

January 27, 2010 at 4:40 pm Posted in: Administrative Announcements, Articles and Books, Book Reviews Print This Post No Comments

Booking it

posted by Kaimipono D. Wenger

I just opened an e-mail from a university press — a nicely designed, eye catching e-mail — glanced at it, and then deleted it. As I did, it occurred to me that I get those sorts of e-mail all the time, and I almost never buy a book based on them. At least, I can’t recall a time I have. How do I decide what books to buy?

As a legal academic, I buy quite a few books. I haven’t counted, but I’m pretty sure it’s between 50 and 75 books in a year, maybe a few more. I buy books for myself personally; I buy books for my office; I send suggestions to the library (and school norms being what they are, a library suggestion is the functional equivalent of ordering a book and putting it on my office shelf, except that it has a call number on the spine).

I get my information about books from a number of sources. I hear about books from friends. I read book reviews in a number of places: The New York Times regularly; the Washington Post and New Republic with some frequency; and sometimes the Wall Street Journal, The Nation, the Weekly Standard or National Review. I read book reviews in law journals — I skim the reviews in the Co-Op participating journals, for instance, and I’ll look at others as well. I read a number of law blogs — Co-Op of course, and also sites like Prawfs, Volokh, Leiter, and the Glom; I also subscribe to e-mail listservs like AALS-Min. I visit the booths and pick up the order forms from the major publishers at AALS. And of course I’m inundated with ads from all directions — lots of direct mail and e-mail. In all of these aspects, I believe that I’m pretty normal for a legal academic.

In thinking about my book buying patterns, a few basic ideas come out. Read the rest of this post »

January 27, 2010 at 10:49 am Posted in: Articles and Books Print This Post 3 Comments

Book Review Project: Free Harvard University Press Books

posted by Daniel Solove

I’m delighted to announce that Harvard University Press is joining our book review project along with Oxford and Cambridge.

Harvard will offer free review copies of their books to anyone whom we approve to write a book review for this blog.

Here are some ideas for books to review:

* Abdullah Ahmed An-Na’im, Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Shari’a (new in paperback)

* Daniel Bodansky, The Art and Craft of International Environmental Law

* David K. Cohen and Susan L. Moffitt, The Ordeal of Equality: Did Federal Regulation Fix the Schools?

* Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788-1836

* Amy Gajda, The Trials of Acadame: The New Era of Campus Litigation

* Risa L. Goluboff, The Lost Promise of Civil Rights (new in paperback)

* Jeffrey M. Jentzen, Death Investigation in America: Coroners, Medical Examiners, and the Pursuit of Medical Certainty

* David H. Kaye, The Double Helix and the Law of Evidence

* Richard J. Leo, Police Interrogation and American Justice (new in paperback)

* Brian McGinty, John Brown’s Trial

* Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Marking of Urban America

* Stephen C. Neff, Justice in Blue and Gray: A Legal History of the American Civil War

* Sharanjeet Parmar, Mindy Jane Roseman, and Saudamini Siegrist, Children and Transitional Justice: Truth-Telling, Accountability, and Reconciliation

* Jack Rakove, The Annotated U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence

* Arthur Ripstein: Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy

* Randolph Roth, American Homicide

* Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice

* Daniel J. Solove, Understanding Privacy (new in paperback)

* Keith Whittington, Constitutional Construction

Feel free to propose a review of any of the above books or any other recent books in Harvard University Press’s catalog. Here’s the link to Harvard’s page for recent titles in law.

Please email your proposals to me.

January 25, 2010 at 7:18 am Posted in: Administrative Announcements, Articles and Books, Book Reviews Print This Post No Comments

Free Review Copies of Cambridge University Press Books to Reviewers

posted by Daniel Solove

As part of our ongoing book review project, where we solicit book reviews from our readers, some university presses are offering free review copies to reviewers whose proposals we accept.

We’re happy to announce that Cambridge University Press will offer free review copies of their books to anyone whom we approve to write a book review for this blog.

Here are some ideas for books to review:

* Elkins, Ginsburg & Melton – The Endurance of National Constitutions
* May & Hoskins – International Criminal Law and Philosophy
* Sarat – Law and the Humanities: An Introduction
* Sarat – Sovereignty, Emergency, Legality
* Vischer – Conscience and the Common Good: Reclaiming the Space Between the Person and the State
* Freeman – Necessary Evils: Amnesties and the Search for Justice
* Charlesworth & Coicaud – Fault Lines of International Legitimacy
* Scharf & Williams Shaping Foreign Policy in Times of Crisis: The Role of
International Law and the State Department Legal Advisor
* Lepard – Customary International Law: A New Theory with Practical
Applications
* Solis – The Law of Armed Conflict
* Zagais – International White Collar Crime
* Richards – Fundamentalism in American Religion and Law
* Den Otter – Judicial Review in an Age of Moral Pluralism
* Burns & Osofsky – Adjudicating Climate Change
* Patterson & Afilalo – The New Global Trading Order: The Evolving State and the Future of Trade

Feel free to propose a review of any of the above books or any other books at Cambridge. Email your proposals to me.

Oxford University Press also offers free review copies.

You can therefore propose to review any book on Oxford or Cambridge’s list, and if we approve you, you’ll be sent a free review copy. Also feel free to review books from other presses, though they currently aren’t offering free review copies.

January 21, 2010 at 4:43 pm Posted in: Articles and Books, Book Reviews Print This Post No Comments

BRIGHT IDEAS: A Dialogue with Brian Tamanaha

posted by Daniel Solove

Professor Brian Tamanaha (Washington University School of Law) has been publishing a number of must-read works in jurisprudence. His latest book is Beyond the Formalist-Realist Divide: The Role of Politics in Judging (Princeton University Press 2010). Brian was gracious enough to respond to my request for a brief dialogue about his ideas in the book. I agree with quite a lot of what Brian argues, but I played a bit of a skeptic in my interview questions, as I wanted to push him on some of his arguments. Here’s our exchange:

Solove: You argue in your book that the “formalist-realist divide” is a myth based on a straw-man account of formalism – that formalists were unduly rigid and mechanistic and that realists correctly pointed out that judges weren’t purely objective robots. You spend the first part of your book debunking the traditional view of formalism, noting that formalists were much more balanced and realistic than their critics give them credit for. You argue that dethroning this picture of formalism should lead to an embrace of “balanced realism.” What do you mean by “balanced realism”?

Tamanaha: My argument is not quite that we have bought into a “straw-man [or exaggerated] account of formalism,” but more strongly, that the “formalist age” was a pure invention by progressive critics to paint judges as deluded or deceptive. I provide substantial evidence in the book showing that judges and jurists at the turn of the century did not believe in “formalism.” There were no avowed “formalists” in the U.S. legal culture (although it did exist in German legal science). Indeed, “formalism” was used as an insult at the time; they associated formalism with a primitive stage in law, which they had progressed beyond; “the Zeitgeist and its dislike of formalism,” wrote a jurist in 1893. I show in the book that, contrary to conventional accounts of the so-called formalist age, the jurists now identified as leading “formalists” (Cooley, Carter, Dillon, etc.) all said very realistic things about judging.

“Balanced realism” recognizes that there are gaps in the law, that sometimes judges have discretion and must make choices, that different judges can sometimes interpret the same law in different ways owing to differences in perspective and background, that inconsistent precedents or conflicts in the applicable law can exist, and that sometimes judges manipulate the law to reach desired ends (I called these factors the “skeptical aspects”); but “balanced realism” also recognizes that a substantial bulk of the time the rules and their application are clear and predictable, that surrounding institutional factors constrain judges, that most judges abide by the commitment to follow the law, and that the overwhelming majority of judicial decisions are legally determined (the “rule bound” aspects).

I call this “balanced realism” because it acknowledges the limitations inherent to law and human judges—which cannot be eliminated—yet it also recognizes that law nonetheless works, that judges can and do render rule bound decisions. For at least two centuries, the book shows, judges and jurists have described law and judging in balanced realist terms. The formalist-realist divide that dominates contemporary views of judging tends to obscure this common ground.

Solove: You write that “the greater danger to the legal system today is posed not by excessive formalism but by excessive skepticism about judging” (p. 197). What do you mean by this?

Tamanaha: The rule bound aspect of judging can function reliably within a legal system notwithstanding the challenges attendant to the skepticism-inducing aspects, but this is an achievement that must be earned, is never perfectly accomplished, and is never guaranteed. Excessive skepticism about judging threatens to disrupt the balance. If our legal culture buys into the view that judging is a cover for politics, then judges might well come to think it is naïve or foolish to strive to live up to the commitment to rule in accordance with the law. If this commitment is lost, rule bound judging will diminish.

Read the rest of this post »

January 19, 2010 at 2:25 pm Posted in: Articles and Books, Book Reviews, Bright Ideas, Constitutional Law, Legal Theory Print This Post No Comments

BRIGHT IDEAS: Helen Nissenbaum’s Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life

posted by Danielle Citron

I’d like to second Dan’s enthusiasm for Helen Nissenbaum’s newest book, Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life (Stanford University Press 2009). Privacy in Context is engrossing and important, and, lucky for us, I had a chance to interview Professor Nissenbaum about the book, her scholarship, and her thoughts on the future of privacy. First, let me tell you a bit about Professor Nissenbaum. Then, I will reproduce our interview below.

Helen Nissenbaum is Professor of Media, Culture and Communication, and Computer Science, at New York University, where she is also Senior Faculty Fellow of the Information Law Institute. Her areas of expertise span social, ethical, and political implications of information technology and digital media. Nissenbaum has written extensively in journals of philosophy, politics, law, media studies, information studies, and computer science and has written and edited four books (including the book we highlight today). She has also authored several important studies of values embodied in computer system design, including search engines, digital games, and facial recognition technology.

DC: Why did you write this book?

HN: I had published a series of articles on how privacy, conceptually and in practice, had been challenged by IT and digital media. Although, initially, these had been mainly critical in tone, for example, demonstrating how “privacy in public” exposed glaring weaknesses not only in predominant understandings of privacy but in approaches law and regulation, as well, they ultimately yielded the substantive idea of privacy as a claim to appropriate flows of personal information within distinctive social contexts, modeling this idea in terms of contextual integrity and — what I call in the book — “context-relative informational norms.” IT systems and digital media are often felt as privacy threats because they are disruptive of entrenched flows, they violate norms.

With these articles in far-flung journals, I realized it would be hard, if not impossible, for anyone to pull the whole argument together, to recognize the problems in certain other approaches and how contextual integrity addressed some of these. A book would consolidate these works into a coherent whole in what I imagined it would be the work of a mere few months — an extravagant miscalculation, of course.

While collaborating with colleagues from the PORTIA project (Adam Barth, Anupam Datta, and John Mitchell) to develop a formal expression of contextual integrity (in linear temporal logic), I came to realize that it needed significant sharpening. Further, it became increasingly clear that the theory needed a far more robust and fleshed out prescriptive (or normative) dimension, which I had only briefly sketched in the Washington Law Review article. This component would be absolutely essential to the success of contextual integrity as a whole, if the theory was to have moral “teeth.” And, of course, the longer I worked the larger the field became, more cases with which to reckon, more outstanding work to take into consideration. Mere months became a couple years.

DC: What for you are the most pressing concerns that the book addresses.

HN: Among the most pressing for me were:

First, to demonstrate that the private-public distinction, as useful as it may be in other areas of political and legal philosophy, is a terrible dead-end for conceptualizing a right to privacy and for formulating policy. In my view, far too much time has been wasted deciding whether this or that piece of information is private or public, whether this or that place is private or public, when, in fact, what ultimately we care about is what constraints ought to be imposed on the flows of this or that information in this or that place. We could make much more rapid progress addressing urgent privacy questions if we addressed the latter questions head-on instead of tying ourselves in knots over the former.

Second, to challenge the definition of privacy as control over information about oneself, which dominates policy realms, even if not to that extent in academia. The trouble with this definition is that it immediately places privacy at odds with other values, conceived as more pro-social. If the right to privacy is the right to control then of course it must be moderated, traded-off, compromised for the general good! Moreover, it not even clear that control offers the best protection to the subject. Imagine, for example, if all that stood between individuals and access to their complete health records was subject consent and place these individual in a situation where a job, or mortgage, the chance to win the lottery, … hung in the balance. Fortunately, U.S. law recognizes that we need substantive constraints on information flow in certain areas – contexts – of life and though critics have pointed out many weaknesses in the letter of these laws, I believe the approach is dead right. Read the rest of this post »

January 18, 2010 at 11:04 am Posted in: Architecture, Articles and Books, Bright Ideas, Privacy, Technology Print This Post 2 Comments

The Year in Privacy Books 2009

posted by Daniel Solove

Here’s a list of notable privacy books published in 2009. For last year’s list, click here.

Frederick S. Lane, American Privacy: The 400-Year History of Our Most Contested Right (Beacon Press 2009)

My blurb: “Frederick Lane’s American Privacy is a highly readable history of the right to privacy in America. It brings to life the people, debates, and events that have shaped our current protections of privacy.”

Helen Nissenbaum, Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life (Stanford 2009)

My blurb: “This book provides a refreshing, contemporary look at information privacy in the twenty-first century. Nissenbaum persuasively argues that privacy must be understood in its social context, and she provides an insightful and illuminating account of how to do so. For anyone considering the burgeoning problems of information privacy, Privacy in Context is essential reading.”

Jeannie Suk, At Home in the Law: How the Domestic Violence Revolution Is Transforming Privacy (Yale 2009)

Suk’s book explores the concept of the home through the lens of law and the humanities. In the process, she examines domestic violence, privacy, burglary, takings, due process, feminism, and more. Suk critiques law in a literary and cultural manner, and her work is interesting, nuanced, and provocative.

Andrea Matwyshyn (editor), Harboring Data: Information Security, Law, and the Corporation (Stanford 2009)

Matwyshyn’s book focuses on data security, and it contains essays from a really top-notch group of experts. It explores data security breach notification laws, as well as the security of various kinds of data (trade secrets, patents, financial, health, children’s information). The book also nicely weaves together several disciplines — law, business, and technology.

Ian Kerr, Carole Lucock, and Valerie Steeves (editors), Lessons from the Identity Trail: Anonymity, Privacy and Identity in a Networked Society (Oxford 2009)

Ian Kerr and his fellow editors have collected a terrific group of essays about privacy and identification. Froomkin, Raab, Nissenbaum, Chandler, and many others have contributed to this volume. This is a great book.

Ross Clark, The Road to Big Brother: One Man’s Struggle Against the Surveillance Society (Encounter Books 2009)

A fun examination of Britain’s CCTV system, which consists of 4.2 million surveillance cameras, as well as other forms of monitoring. Clark weaves together personal anecdotes and interesting facts in this short and humorous book. An enjoyable read.

—————————————————————————————————

NOTE: I must mention a pet-peeve of mine. A few of the books above could have been improved if the books contained citations. Although I greatly enjoyed Lane and Clark’s books, I found their lack of notes to be quite frustrating. This seems to be a trend with commercial presses — having authors forgo any citations whatsoever. While endnotes are slightly distracting, their benefits far outweigh this cost. They are especially helpful to check the accuracy of facts and research as well as to locate sources for further research. Even in non-scholarly books, notes are valuable and should not be excluded.

January 13, 2010 at 8:09 pm Posted in: Articles and Books, Book Reviews, Privacy Print This Post 3 Comments

Book Review: The Universal First Amendment – Bold Ideas for Press Freedom in a Global Era

posted by Ronald K.L. Collins

Uninhibited, Robust and Wide-Open: A Press for a New Century by Lee C. Bollinger. Oxford University Press, 2010, pp. 210. Cloth: $21.95.

Thirty or so years ago I had the honor of working with Robert Maynard Hutchins (then at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions) to help organize a two-day conference on constitutional law. Hutchins knew all of the luminaries of the day and invited notables such as Charles Black, Henry Steele Commager, Max Lerner, Louis Pollak, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Laurence Tribe, Jesse Choper, and Charles Wyzanski. He turned to me, then a recent law graduate, to help identify some of the “up and coming players” in constitutional law – people who would “make a name for themselves and leave a mark on the law.” Happily, I obliged him and recommended, among others, Steve Shiffrin (UCLA) and C. Edwin Baker (Oregon). Oh, there was one other person I recommended; he was then an associate professor at the University of Michigan – Lee Carroll Bollinger.

Back then, in a cogent essay entitled “Elitism, The Masses & the Idea of Self-Government” (published in Constitutional Government in America), Professor Bollinger expressed concern about the “‘central meaning of the First Amendment,’” particularly as it pertained to broadcast regulation. Since then he has revisited that general concern, in one way or another, in a variety of thoughtful works such as The Tolerant Society (1986), Images of a Free Press (1991), and Eternally Vigilant (2002) co-edited with Geoffrey R. Stone. Now, with the recent publication of Uninhibited, Robust and Wide-Open, Lee Bollinger (president of Columbia) returns, yet again, to the grand optimism expressed by Justice William Brennan in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964), from which the title of his latest book derives.

The book is the eighth installment in Oxford’s Inalienable Rights Series edited by Professor Stone. Bollinger is a sensible pick given his background as an esteemed First Amendment scholar and as a university president whose toleration has been tested by both campus free speech protestors (see NYT, Oct. 22, ‘06) and by critics outraged by his willingness to allow Iran’s president to speak at Columbia (see WSJ, Sept. 24, ‘07). He also serves as a director of the Washington Post Company. All in all, Bollinger brings both idealism and pragmatism to his project. As the book’s title suggests, his hope is to infuse the spirit of the former into the realities of the latter. Professor Bollinger thus invites his readers and the courts to reconsider and recast some of their notions of First Amendment law.

Read the rest of this post »

January 13, 2010 at 6:50 pm Posted in: Articles and Books, Book Reviews, First Amendment Print This Post No Comments

Understanding Privacy, A Book Review

posted by Danielle Citron

My colleague Leslie Meltzer Henry and I just posted, on SSRN, our piece Visionary Pragmatism and the Value of Privacy in the Twenty-First Century, 108 Michigan Law Review (forthcoming 2010), a book review of Dan Solove’s Understanding Privacy. Although we have a tight timeline for editing, we would love feedback on it.

January 5, 2010 at 1:06 pm Posted in: Articles and Books, Legal Theory, Privacy, Technology Print This Post No Comments

Louis Brandeis

posted by Gerard Magliocca

I 85px-Louis_Brandeis_Associate_Justice_c1916 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 Print This Post 2 Comments

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) Print This Post No Comments

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) Print This Post 12 Comments

Concurring Opinions Book Reviews

posted by Daniel Solove

book28a 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) Print This Post One Comment

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 Print This Post No Comments

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 Print This Post 7 Comments

Predicting Social Security Numbers from Public Data

posted by Daniel Solove

ssn 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) Print This Post 2 Comments

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 Print This Post 2 Comments