Law & Humanities Blog

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• Dan Solove's New Book Makes Its Debut
• Holmes' Dissents
• British Women On the Bench
• The History and Theory of Food and Drug Law

Dan Solove's New Book Makes Its Debut Posted: 03 May 2011 03:01 PM PDT Daniel Solove's new book Nothing To Hide: The False Tradeoff Between Privacy and Security (Yale University Press, 2011) is now available. Here's a description. "If you've got nothing to hide," many people say, "you shouldn't worry about government surveillance." Others argue that we must sacrifice privacy for security. But as Daniel J. Solove argues in this important book, these arguments and many others are flawed. They are based on mistaken views about what it means to protect privacy and the costs and benefits of doing so. The debate between privacy and security has been framed incorrectly as a zero-sum game in which we are forced to choose between one value and the other. Why can't we have both? In this concise and accessible book, Solove exposes the fallacies of many pro-security arguments that have skewed law and policy to favor security at the expense of privacy. Protecting privacy isn't fatal to security measures; it merely involves adequate oversight and regulation. Solove traces the history of the privacy-security debate from the Revolution to the present day. He explains how the law protects privacy and examines concerns with new technologies. He then points out the failings of our current system and offers specific remedies. Nothing to Hide makes a powerful and compelling case for reaching a better balance between privacy and security and reveals why doing so is essential to protect our freedom and democracy. Although the publication date reads May 31, I've already received my copy.

Holmes' Dissents Posted: 03 May 2011 09:18 AM PDT Allen Mendenhall, Auburn University, Temple University, West Virginia University, & Furman University, has published Holmes and Dissent (forthcoming in the Journal Jurisprudence). Here is the abstract. Holmes saw the dissent as a mechanism to advance and preserve arguments and as a pageant for wordplay. Dissents, for Holmes, occupied an interstitial space between law and non-law. The thought and theory of pragmatism allowed him to recreate the dissent as a stage for performative text, a place where signs and syntax could mimic the environment of the particular time and place and in so doing become, or strive to become, law. Dissents were, for Holmes, sites of aesthetic adaptation. The language of his dissents was acrobatic. It acted and reacted and called attention to itself. The more provocative and aesthetic the language, the more likely it was for future judges and commentators to return to that dissent to reconsider Holmes's argument – the more likely, that is, that non-law might become law. In this sense, language for Holmes was not just a vehicle for law but also law itself. This article argues that Holmes's dissents both reflect and revise pragmatist philosophy and also that the outgrowth of the dissent has to do with American pragmatism. Focusing on Lochner v. New York (1905), Abrams v. United States (1919), and Bartels v.