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Cloud concerns and data safety in the legal profession
So the fact that Dropbox allows legal access to your data is not the end of the world for use of the cloud, even for lawyers. But for truly secure offsite storage, likely more secure than even old-fashioned paper storage, consider solutions that provide end-to-end encryption.
May 2011 / 3 min.
How I use a blog in my research and writing
As someone who does not blog to earn money (I like to pay my hosting fees, but that’s only because I’m a poor grad student), I thought I’d run through how and why I blog, and why I find it a critical part of my “real” work of academic research and writing.
May 2011 / 5 min.
Judge Noble Hand hints at the move from property to people
I have already discussed how Fourth Amendment protections and related “right to privacy” have shifted from a focus on property in the 19th century to one focused on people in the 20th. Judge Noble Hand’s 1897 law review article, Schuyler against Curtis and the Right to Privacy, gives some interesting hints about how American jurists contributed to this shift.
April 2011 / 4 min.
Confidentiality vs. privacy
In the law, there is a difference between confidentiality and privacy, and it’s a difference that’s important for both legal history (highlighted by the 20th century focus on the right to privacy in American law, as opposed to a 19th century focus on confidentiality) and contemporary law.
April 2011 / 3 min.
Were telegrams privileged communications?
With the introduction of the telegraph in the 1800s, some jurists, recognizing the growing importance of telegraphic communication, advocated for a kind of “telegraph operator-customer” privilege.
April 2011 / 7 min.
The long-forgotten “mere evidence” rule
The “mere evidence” rule, forbidding searches for documents that were themselves not “instrumentalities” crimes (or contraband themselves) lasted well into the twentieth century before being abandoned. So why were telegrams never explicitly covered by the rule?
April 2011 / 3 min.
An argument for the “Inviolability of Telegraphic Correspondence”
Former Michigan Supreme Court Justice Thomas M. Cooley, in a forward-looking article, advocated for extending Fourth Amendment protections to telegrams in 1879. Cooley articulated a position that both foreshadowed 20th century arguments over telephone wiretaps, and reflected his late 19th century concerns.
April 2011 / 5 min.
The slow pace of Fourth Amendment change
In Protections for Electronic Communications: the Stored Communications Act and the Fourth Amendment, Alexander Scolnik wrote: As technology evolves, giving individuals new forms of communicating and government agents increasingly sophisticated tools for surveillance, courts have had to continually interpret the Fourth Amendment and define the extent of its reach in light of these new advances.
April 2011 / 2 min.
The Fourth Amendment: from property to people
For the Fourth Amendment-the prohibition against unreasonable search and seizure-one of these foundational cases was Entick v. Carrington (1765). It was not until Katz in 1965 that the Supreme Court returned to the tradition of ex Parte Jackson and held that “the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places.”
April 2011 / 4 min.
Working around the rules to give you movies on demand
David Pogue writes about a new startup that’s trying to work around the limitations media companies have placed on movie providers like Netflix and Redbox.
March 2011 / 3 min.