LAW 853 - Comparative Privacy Law

College of Law
1 credit(s) Irregularly

Domestic legal systems vouchsafe and define “privacy,” and its first cousin “dignity,” in different ways that strongly reflect local legal and cultural values. Yet, in an increasingly globalized world, purely local protection of privacy interests may prove insufficient to safeguard effectively fundamental autonomy interests - interests that lie at the core of self-definition, personal autonomy, and freedom. This short course will survey constitutional privacy rights in the United States, Canada, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and in the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights. Consideration of constitutional privacy protections in these jurisdictions will establish important points of transnational agreement about how to define and protect privacy interests; it will also demonstrate that serious disagreements exist about protecting privacy - most notable in resolving the inherent tension between protecting both privacy and freedom of speech. The course will give sustained attention to the potential benefits and challenges that will confront any serious efforts to harmonize constitutional privacy protections across national borders. A comparative legal analysis of privacy will also illuminate, some of the important underlying social and political values that lead the U.S. to fail to protect privacy as reliably or as comprehensively as other liberal democracies. Finally, and no less important in this era of Big Data, drones, and society-wide surveillance programs, the short course will consider carefully the significant interrelationship that exists between privacy and speech in the context of sustaining and facilitating democratic self-government.