Document Type

Working Paper

Publication Date

3-7-2016

SSRN Discipline

Legal Scholarship Network; PRN Subject Matter eJournals; Philosophy Research Network; Law School Research Papers - Legal Studies; Law & Society eJournals; Law & Society: Public Law eJournals; LSN Subject Matter eJournals; Constitutional Law, Jurisprudence & Legal Philosophy eJournals; Humanities Network; Political Science Network

Abstract

This essay an afterword to an important collection of essays considering the potential salience of privacy in the era of Big Data and drones posits that a comparative legal analysis could shed important light on how law both succeeds and fails to secure privacy interests Because many of the current and pressing threats to privacy particularly with respect to nondisclosure of personal data do not respect national borders we should to borrow a turn of phrase from Justice Elena Kagan seek good ideas about how best to secure privacy rights wherever we can find them In other words rather than merely guessing about the potential efficacy of potential responses to the growing threats to privacy it would make more sense to consider whether particular regulatory approaches have proven successful "“ or unsuccessful "“ in other countries that share a meaningful legal commitment to safeguarding privacy interests To be sure the protection of privacy in other democratic nations reflects and incorporates different legal social institutional and moral understandings of privacy rights Yet at the same time foreign privacy laws also reflect a core of common concerns and objectives knowledge and consideration of foreign privacy regimes could assist us in assessing the virtues and shortcomings of our contemporary domestic arrangements Even if at the end of the day we choose not to revisit our domestic regulation of privacy interests our law of privacy would surely by the better for undertaking the exercise In sum a comparative legal perspective could help to improve our domestic legal system's response to the growing reality of a world without privacy

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