Privacy, Property, and Free Speech: Law and the Constitution

Courts have struggled to balance the interests of individuals, businesses, and law enforcement. Educate yourself about the current state of the law and the risks posed by our own inventions with guidance from an award-winning legal scholar. Overview Course No. 9438

Although the courts have struggled to balance the interests of individuals, businesses, and law enforcement, the proliferation of intrusive new technologies puts many of our presumed freedoms in legal limbo. For instance, it’s not hard to envision a day when websites such as Facebook or Google Maps introduce a feature that allows real-time tracking of anyone you want, based on face-recognition software and ubiquitous live video feeds. Does this scenario sound like an unconstitutional invasion of privacy? These 24 eye-opening lectures immerse you in the Constitution, the courts, and the post-9/11 Internet era that the designers of our legal system could scarcely have imagined. Professor Rosen explains the most pressing legal issues of the modern day and asks how the framers of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights would have reacted to aspects of modern life such as full-body scans, cell phone surveillance, and privacy in cloud servers. Called “the nation’s most widely read and influential legal commentator” by the Los Angeles Times, Professor Rosen is renowned for his ability to bring legal issues alive – to put real faces and human drama behind the technical issues that cloud many legal discussions. Here he asks how you would decide particular cases about liberty and privacy. You’ll come away with a more informed opinion about whether modern life gives even the most innocent among us reason to worry.

Video Lectures

01: Freedom and Technological Change

Consider three hypothetical cases that could confront the U.S. Supreme Court in the decades ahead: ubiquitous surveillance, designer embryos, and evidence from brain scans. Each has profound implications for privacy. Then survey the history of legal protections for privacy.

• Duration: 34 min

02: Privacy and Virtual Surveillance

Examine areas where new technologies are challenging our existing ideas about constitutional protections for privacy in public places. Review reasons why the Constitution provides less protection against surveillance today than it did against the search of private diaries in the 18th century.

• Duration: 28 min

03: Privacy at Home

Study the evolution of privacy in the home, which remains the place with more legal protection than anywhere else. But what does that mean in an age when our most private papers are stored not in locked desk drawers in the home but with third parties such as computer networks?

• Duration: 30 min

04: Privacy on the Street

Today, police in the United States have the power to arrest and detain individuals for any crime, regardless of how minor. In this lecture, survey your rights on the street, where the degree of monitoring has spread to new technologies such as speed cameras and smart parking meters.

• Duration: 29 min

05: The Privacy of Travelers

In 2009, the Transportation Security Administration began using body scans as a primary screening tool at airports. What are your rights when faced with this and other security measures? Learn how to assert those rights while traveling in the United States and abroad.

• Duration: 31 min

06: Privacy and National Security

Analyze the domestic war on terror in light of the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure. Begin with Perfect Citizen, a government program designed to monitor private computer networks to forestall cyber assaults. How should the courts weigh privacy rights in such cases?

• Duration: 33 min

07: Privacy in the Courtroom

The Fifth Amendment guarantee against forced self-incrimination has dwindled to a vestigial protection for suspected white-collar criminals. Suspects are now subject to procedures, such as blood tests, that can compel self-incrimination. The future holds even more intrusive technologies that rely on neuroimaging.

• Duration: 31 min

08: Privacy in the Police Station

The main protection for mental privacy today is provided not by the Fifth Amendment but by the Miranda warning, given by police to suspects in custody. Investigate the origin of this safeguard and the continued problem with false confessions and faulty eyewitness testimony.

• Duration: 34 min

09: Privacy in Electronic Communications

Have you ever had an email or text message go astray? Was it only embarrassing or were there more serious consequences? See how incentives in the law have led many employers to search the most private areas of the workplace, including email, as often as possible.

• Duration: 31 min

10: Privacy in Cell Phones and Computers

Examine privacy protections for data stored on cell phones and computers. Also look at how the Internet is blurring boundaries between home, work, and school. For example, should school administrators be able to punish students for their social media posts that are uploaded from home?

• Duration: 30 min

11: The Internet and the End of Forgetting

With job recruiters routinely vetting candidates through Internet searches, youthful indiscretions posted online can doom a career. Probe the alarming prospect that we may never be able to escape our past or reinvent ourselves in the classic American way.

• Duration: 29 min

12: Follow-Me Advertising Online

Thanks to online data mining, companies can guess facts about you that you may have told no one—such as that you’re planning to get engaged or that you have a child on the way. Discover how information about you is collected, analyzed, and used, and what you can do about it.

• Duration: 30 min

13: Privacy and the Body

Trace the constitutional right to privacy, invoked in two landmark Supreme Court cases: Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 and Roe v. Wade in 1973. They dealt with contraception and abortion, respectively, but the reasoning and politics are vastly different in each. Explore the issues in depth and decide what you think.

• Duration: 30 min

14: The Right to Die

The increasing sophistication of medical care raises a host of legal issues about when treatment should cease and under whose authority. Investigate the response of the courts to right-to-die cases and practical steps you can take to avoid a legal struggle when the end nears.

• Duration: 29 min

15: Privacy and Sexual Intimacy in Marriage

Explore cases where the Supreme Court has been careful to not render a sweeping constitutional judgment on matters under intense public debate. Examples include eugenics and interracial marriage, which reached a national consensus several decades ago. Also look at today’s issue of gay marriage.

• Duration: 34 min

16: The Constitution and Private Property

Private property has a special status in the Constitution. Study how individual property rights apply to the Second Amendment’s protection of the right to bear arms, as well as to the Privileges and Immunities Clause, the Full Faith and Credit Clause, the Copyright Clause, and the Third and Fourth Amendments.

• Duration: 30 min

17: The Supreme Court and Private Property

In the first of two lectures on the Supreme Court and economic liberty, follow the court’s record in economic rights cases from the Gilded Age to the New Deal, focusing on Lochner v. New York, a 1905 case that limited the ability of government to regulate business.

• Duration: 31 min

18: The Roberts Court and Economic Rights

Beginning with insights from Professor Rosen’s interview with Chief Justice John Roberts, evaluate the current Court’s approach to economic rights cases, including the Citizens United case that struck down federal campaign finance laws and the Court’s decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act.

• Duration: 30 min

19: Takings and Eminent Domain

What constitutes a “taking” of private property? And what constitutes a “public use”? See how the Supreme Court has struggled with interpreting the Takings Clause, culminating in one of the most controversial decisions of the modern era, Kelo v. New London, in 2005.

• Duration: 29 min

20: The American Free Speech Tradition

The crowning achievement of the American free speech tradition is the principle that speech can only be suppressed when it poses an imminent threat of provoking serious lawless action. Learn how this key principle wasn’t embraced by the Supreme Court until the 20th century.

• Duration: 31 min

21: From WikiLeaks to the Arab Spring

Free speech is being tested by 21st-century controversies such as WikiLeaks, a website that publishes classified information and news leaks. Study the issues raised by this phenomenon. Also investigate the role of free speech in the Arab uprisings in 2010, and examine the effort to suppress offensive speech.

• Duration: 30 min

22: Google, Facebook, and the First Amendment

The gatekeepers for free speech online are not judges or legislators, but companies such as Google and Facebook, which decide what can be communicated case by case. Explore the power of these corporations, and look at the movement known as Network Neutrality.

• Duration: 30 min

23: The Right to Be Forgotten

Now that online posts live forever, it is hard to escape one’s past. Learn how a proposed data-protection law in Europe seeks to guarantee “the right to be forgotten.” But what are the implications for free speech if individuals and companies have a broad right to delete information that they don’t like?

• Duration: 30 min

24: The Constitution in 2040

Look ahead at technological challenges to constitutional values that may arise in the coming decades. One important conclusion is that you as a citizen have an obligation to protect your own rights. Close the course with five practical tips that you can use to protect your privacy today.

• Duration: 33 min