In its draft Data Protection Regulation, the European Union has announced a major new economic and human right – the right to data portability ('RDP'). The basic idea of the RDP is that an individual would be able to transfer his or her material from one information service to another, without...

This article examines the tension between social networks as enablers of political mobilization (sharing information is good) and as threats to privacy (sharing information is bad). A central theme is that social networks are platforms to create associations. Linguistically, “networks” and...

This article addresses two subjects concerning international choice of law and the Internet. It examines the choice of law regime created by the E.U. Data Protection Directive, which enters into effect in October, 1998. The Directive shows the uses and limitations of harmonization as an...

A good deal of recent attention has focused on the potential for "self-regulation" on the Internet and more generally. This article proposes a general framework for deciding among markets, self-regulation and government enforcement in the protection of personal information. Self-regulation is...

This article is part of a Wisconsin Law Review symposium in honor of the work of Neil Komesar, and particularly his book “Imperfect Alternatives: Choosing Institutions in Law, Economics, and Public Policy.” I used this as the main text in 2003 for one of the first law school courses on...

This article presents and analyzes significant ways that both the European Union and the United States are stricter in certain respects than the other, for the privacy of government requests for information. The ways that both sides are stricter in significant respects has not been clearly...

This article examines the interaction between data privacy, which was a highly salient political issue before the events of September 11, and cyber-security and homeland security, which became much more salient after those events. The article illustrates the shift in salience by examining the...

In 2018, the U.S. Congress passed the Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act (Cloud Act) to address the ubiquitous need for law enforcement to access personally identified evidence stored outside of its physical jurisdiction. The Cloud Act did so in part by codifying that the U.S. government...

What legal tools do privacy advocates have available to defend an individual's right to privacy? How far does this right go? How should these rights be defended — or if necessary — curtailed? What is the role of Government, of the practicing bar, and of academics?

Prepared for the North Carolina Law Review symposium on police body-worn Cameras (“BWC”s), this Article shows that BWCs can be conceptualized as an example of the Internet of Things (“IoT”). By combining the previously separate literatures on BWCs and IoT, this Article shows how insights...