A World without Privacy: What Law Can and Should Do?

Description

Recent revelations about America's National Security Agency offer a reminder of the challenges posed by the rise of the digital age for American law. These challenges refigure the meaning of autonomy and of the word 'social' in an age of new modalities of surveillance and social interaction. Each of these developments seems to portend a world without privacy, or in which the meaning of privacy is transformed, both as a legal idea and a lived reality. Each requires us to rethink the role of law, can it keep up with emerging threats to privacy and provide effective protection against new forms of surveillance? This book offers some answers. It considers different understandings of privacy and provides examples of legal responses to the threats to privacy associated with new modalities of surveillance, the rise of digital technology, the excesses of the Bush and Obama administrations, and the continuing war on terror.

Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence Political Science at Amherst College, where he is also Associate Dean of the Faculty, and Justice Hugo L. Black Senior Faculty Scholar at the University of Alabama School of Law. He is the author or editor of numerous books, including Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America's Death Penalty (with Katherine Blumstein, Aubrey Jones, Heather Richard, and Madeline Sprung-Keyser, 2014); Re-imagining To Kill a Mockingbird: Family, Community, and the Possibility of Equal Justice under Law (2013); Legal Responses to Religious Practices in the United States: Accommodation and its Limits (2012); and Civility, Legality, and the Limits of Justice (2014). Sarat is the editor of the journals Law, Culture and the Humanities and Studies in Law, Politics and Society. His book When Government Breaks the Law: Prosecuting the Bush Administration was named one of the best books of 2010 by the Huffington Post.