Overview

Most people believe that our rights to privacy and free speech are inevitably in conflict. Courts all over the world have struggled with how to reconcile the two for over a century, and the rise of the Internet has made this problem more urgent. We live in an age of corporate and government surveillance of our lives. And our free speech culture has created an anything-goes environment on the web, filled with hurtful and harmful expression and data flows. In Intellectual Privacy, Neil Richards offers a solution that ensures that our ideas and values keep pace with our technologies. Because of the importance of free speech to open societies, he argues that when privacy and free speech truly conflict, free speech should almost always win. But in sharp contrast to conventional wisdom, Richards argues that speech and privacy are only rarely in conflict. True invasions of privacy like peeping toms or electronic surveillance should almost never be protected as ""free speech."" And critically, Richards shows how most of the law we enact to protect online privacy poses no serious burden to public debate, and how protecting the privacy of our data is not censorship. A timely and provocative book on a subject that affects us all, Intellectual Privacy will radically reshape the debate about privacy and free speech in our digital age.

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9780199946143

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Reviews

Important... Provides invaluable guidance for citizens and judges as they wrestle with questions involving privacy and free speech today... Eloquent and concise. - Jeffrey Rosen, The Washington Post

After tracking the origins of privacy theory and showing how the original idea, as promoted by Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, was flawed at its conception and misapplied over time, Richards carefully constructs a theory about the incubation of new ideas and explains that respect for privacy allows for intellectual exploration and development. This later section, in which Richards moves away from parsing court decisions in favor of a broader philosophical inquiry, is the heart of the book and stands as its main and important contribution to the literature. * S. B. Lichtman, Shippensburg University, CHOICE * This book brings fresh perspective and some clear ideas to privacy law and its interaction with freedom of speech. This book is stimulating and thought-provoking, and is recommended for those with an interest in privacy, free speech, and the interplay of those with technological innovation. * Arye Schreiber, The Cambridge Law Journal * Intellectual Privacy is a book that every privacy scholar needs to read and a book that deserves a much wider readership than that. Though it is a legal book the detailed legal and historical analyses that Richards provides throughout the book are scholarly and yet accessible it has implications well beyond the law, from business practices to personal responsibilities. * Paul Bernal, International Data Privacy Law *

Author Information

Neil Richards is a Professor of Law at Washington University in St. Louis, where he teaches and writes about privacy, technology, and civil liberties. He was born in England and educated in the United States, where he earned a B.A. from George Washington University, and graduate degrees in law and history from the University of Virginia. Before becoming an academic, he practiced law in Washington, D.C., and served as a law clerk to William H. Rehnquist, Chief Justice of the United States.

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