Prerequisite: None

Exam Type: In Class

Privacy is a key concern motivating legal challenges to private firms and public entities alike. Further, privacy is a key regulatory concern of important industrial sectors, most notably healthcare, finance, education, communications, and technology. Questions of privacy are therefore increasingly common, and essential to practitioners across a wide variety of legal practice areas. This course surveys the legal frameworks in the United States that define and govern privacy, including constitutional, statutory, and common law sources. Topics will include the goals of privacy law, the trade-offs between privacy and other social values and legal rights, a critical examination of domain-specific statutory privacy protections, and ongoing legislative reform. The course will also include discussions of international approaches to privacy law, with a particular emphasis on European data protection, policing, and surveillance laws. The course includes discussion of topics that go beyond the domain of information privacy law, including advertising law, consumer protection, intellectual property, and family law, where relevant to core privacy law topics.

Students may complete a research paper that would satisfy the Analytical Paper requirement.