Posted on 05/01/2009 10:52:29 PM PDT by HaplessToad
Last year, when law professor Joel Reidenberg wanted to show his Fordham University class how readily private information is available on the Internet, he assigned a group project. It was collecting personal information from the Web about himself.
This year, after U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia made public comments that seemingly may have questioned the need for more protection of private information, Reidenberg assigned the same project. Except this time Scalia was the subject, the prof explains to the ABA Journal in a telephone interview.
His class turned in a 15-page dossier that included not only Scalia's home address, home phone number and home value, but his food and movie preferences, his wife's personal e-mail address and photos of his grandchildren, reports Above the Law.
And, as Scalia himself made clear in a statement to Above the Law, he isn't happy about the invasion of his privacy:
"Professor Reidenberg's exercise is an example of perfectly legal, abominably poor judgment. Since he was not teaching a course in judgment, I presume he felt no responsibility to display any," the justice says, among other comments.
...
(Excerpt) Read more at abajournal.com ...
Hah. I think they made a good point to the justice, just as they did to Souter when they tried to eminent domain his house.
It’s telling that they didn’t dare try this with Ginsburg.
These liberal profs really go overboard with their agenda.
Most law students don’t fight back either because most law students are in fact really, really stupid (I know I am one).
Being in the top 1% of people who are lawyers still makes you dumber then the top quintile of most math and science professions.
These legal peons are easily plied into disgusting vultures of suffering.
For every John Roberts and Scalia, there are a 100 john edwards out there: thanks to people like this Fordham professor.
How dare they treat a supreme court justice like one of us peons. The nerve.
hey, they’re talking about your guy
“It’s telling that they didn’t dare try this with Ginsburg”
Why would they? Scalia is the one who said current privacy laws were sufficient, not Ginsburg.
She’d surely sue them....
We need one secure central gov’t databank to store all our private information so it will be safe and properly doled out to only the right people. /s
Too bad he has a home in NH to return to. I was rooting for the “eminent domainers” in this case.
I hope when a professor from another university decides to make the assignment about Joel Reidenberg instead of Scalia.....they don’t find out he likes to dress up in women’s panties.
I'm glad you are that aware of your surroundings.
“Hah. I think they made a good point to the justice, just as they did to Souter when they tried to eminent domain his house.”
Whatever happened in that case?
Joel Reidenberg used himself as the subject last year.
Assigning them to make a "dossier" on Scalia is the first step in setting him up.
I disagree. There is substantially more information publicly available about a Supreme Court Justice then there is about an average citizen. Justice Scalia's comments were about private citizens. Creating a dossier about a Supreme Court Justice bears no relevance to how much information is available about a private citizen.
If you read the column again, the first assignment WAS for the class to collect information about the professor. It was only after Justice Scalia's assertion that current protections of privacy are adequate that the professor changed the assignment to Justice Scalia.
He was making a point, and as much as I like and respect Justice Scalia, I believe that it's a very important and good one.
Unfortunately, today we are living in a world where your very life might well depend on the privacy of personal information, yet the laws that protect individuals from government and criminal intrusion on that privacy were written before the concept of an electronic database was conceived. Even worse, it seems that many of the laws that have been implemented to "protect" our privacy have been written by the most clueless in society, or those who stand to profit from selective access to that private information. HIPPA is a terrific example of this. Unfortunately, it seems that the horses are already out of the barn, but we still need to close the door.
Mark
It’s ironic that the supreme justice was done to a Supreme Court Justice.
A few years ago one of my neighbors was accused of trying to sell drugs to one of the kids in our neighborhood. So I started to look for a criminal record and that kind of thing. I was stunned at the degree to which I could look into his personal life.
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