Privacy Courses

Privacy Courses

Many other courses also touch on privacy law. Copyright Law includes cases related to privacy and data security. Energy Law covers the Smart Grid and the concerns that information about a person’s energy use will leak. Civil Procedure includes discovery matters that touch on private and confidential information. Entrepreneurship Law covers the privacy terms and conditions of contracts for online services.

Students have written papers on privacy and data security issues in Entertainment Law and New Technologies Law. In International and Comparative Labor and Employment Law students learn about privacy issues in the U.S., the E.U., and Germany.  In International and Comparative Antitrust, comparative law privacy issues are addressed.

Law of Privacy

Law of Privacy

Law of Privacy provides an overview of legal privacy tools in the United States and the challenges of regulating information privacy in an age when governments, private entities, and individuals all constantly seek and reveal information.

The course starts by examining the philosophical underpinnings of U.S. privacy law, including Warren and Brandeis’s landmark 1890 law review article The Right to Privacy. Subsequently, we will study constitutional privacy protections, federal and state surveillance laws and their application to emerging technologies, statutory privacy protections, tort law, and social norms.

We will also discuss privacy of particular kinds of data, including social media, school, and medical information. The course also examines defenses to assertions of privacy, such as First Amendment free speech rights. In addition, we will incorporate privacy developments in the news as they arise.

E-Commerce

E-Commerce

This course begins with online contracting and then moves on to a number of issues related to online information with a focus on online privacy and security. A main goal of the course is to place legal issues in an appropriate technical context.

The course does not require technical knowledge of computers or programming, but it does open technical “black boxes” to ensure a realistic and relevant discussion of legal issues. In particular, the course examines the use of predictive analytics (“big data”) for a variety of business and security purposes.

Computer and Network Privacy and Security

Computer and Network Privacy and Security

This course address issues of current concern in privacy and security. It is cross listed with the University of Illinois, Chicago, Computer Science Department, and is co-taught by Richard Warner and Robert Sloan, Head of the Department at UIC.

With computer science and law students in the same room, the course delves reasonably deeply into the technical background to legal issues, and into the differing attitudes in legal and technical cultures. The course does not however assume any technical knowledge (on the part of law students) or any legal knowledge (on the part of computer science students).

Topics vary from offering to offering but typically include the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, encryption, predictive analytics (“big data”), malware, and other forms of unauthorized access, and emerging requirements for information security.

Programming for Lawyers

Programming for Lawyers

Computer programming has become a vital skill even for non-technical professionals. It is also essential for anyone who wants to “open the black box” and look inside the factors shaping contemporary life. The course is an introduction to programming and to legal issues of current concern.

It introduces students to programming in Python, software design, and basic data science techniques. It also opens the black box on several legal issues shaping our contemporary world. Programs and programing concepts create novel problems and solutions in current debates about privacy, police powers, intellectual property, consumer protection, and anti-discrimination.

Programing examples will be connected to topics such as predictive policing and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. No prior knowledge programming is required.

Health Law Survey

Health Law Survey

This course surveys the intersection of the American legal system with the finance, delivery, organization, and regulation of health care. Topics to be covered include health care cost and access issues, health care policy and financing, and health care regulatory issues. Each of these broad subjects brings to the field of health law a number of fascinating and at times controversial legal and ethical problems which we will selectively explore. Our studies cover data privacy and security, regulatory compliance with an emphasis on Fraud, Abuse, Stark and Civil Monetary Penalty transactions, government and private health insurance benefits with an emphasis on the Accountable Care Act, professional and institutional responsibility and liability, tax exemption and governance of healthcare institutions.

Professor Joan Lebow, who teaches this course, is also the author of the chapter on Confidentiality and Privacy (Chapter 36) in The Law of Medical Practice in Illinois since 2007.