»Unlabelled » Law & Humanities Blog

Law & Humanities Blog

Law & Humanities Blog

A History of the Privacy Profession

Posted: 08 Apr 2014 01:31 PM PDT

Andrew Clearwater, University of Maine School of Law, and J. Trevor Hughes, International Association of Privacy Professionals, have published In the Beginning...An Early History of the Privacy Profession, at 74 Ohio State Law Journal 897 (2013). Here is the abstract. 

Privacy is a concept that has existed in various forms and degrees, for much of human history. However, the origin of information privacy as a compliance, risk management, and operational concern has been much more recent. This new field, and the professionals who work within it — the privacy profession — did not exist broadly until the past decade. From essentially no active professionals in the 1970s and 1980s, the privacy profession has grown to at least 13,000 people working on managing information privacy within their organizations. As the information economy continues to grow — pushed by the breath-taking speed of technological development, cloud computing, big data, and emerging uses for exponentially increasing stores of data — it is reasonable to expect that the privacy profession will grow. The exact trajectory of the privacy profession is difficult to predict. Management of privacy is, today, a well-established and important function, and it is obvious that the professionals who work in this field will grow in number and prominence in the coming years.
Without knowing where we've come from, we can't know where we are going and so it is appropriate for us to document the nascent years of the privacy profession. We expect that, at some point in the future, scholars will seek to understand how the field of privacy management emerged, who served as a catalyst for the growth of the field, and what the important milestones for the privacy profession were as the turbulence of the early days of the information economy played out. While this history is most certainly global — the privacy profession has its earliest roots in Germany in the 1970s — we have chosen to investigate this change where we understand it best and where the profession has appeared to grow the most, the United States. We have also limited our focus to the role of the privacy professional and privacy lawyer. There are certainly public policy leaders and advocates in the privacy field who deserve well-documented histories. Through these lenses, we offer a history of privacy becoming a profession.
Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

A Conference at St. Mary's University (UK), September 3-4, 2014

Posted: 08 Apr 2014 10:01 AM PDT


St. Mary's University, Twickenham, London, Strawberry Hill Campus

Wednesday 3rd September – Thursday 4th September 2014

Law both regulates cultural representations and creates them. These dual themes will be explored in a conference focused upon the twin strands of law and visual culture, and law and gender.
How does law regulate gender; how does it regulate images? What is/are the relationship/s between visual culture and the gendering of law? How have gendered divisions structured the legal profession and practice, and what is the role of the visual in understanding such complexities? How can visual culture and representation challenge or enlighten the gendered dimensions of law? This conference is aimed at exploring the intersections of law, gender, and the visual in an effort to address such questions and related concerns.
Papers are sought in relation to the dual themes of the conference:
  • Visualising Law: Intersection(s) of law with visual culture, in all its manifestations (including graphic fiction and Graphic Justice, TV, film, photo-journalism, art and art history). The conference welcomes an exploration of 'law' and 'visual culture' in the broadest sense of these terms.
  • Gendering Law: The representation of gender in the law, historically and today, and the law's responses to wider cultural representations (topics may include but are not limited to gendering legal history, law as gendered spectacle, sexuality and the law).
Papers traversing or combining these broad themes are particularly welcome.

Submit abstracts (300 words) to the organisers: thomas.giddens@smuc.ac.uk or judith.bourne@smuc.ac.uk. no later than 31st May 2014.

The organisers are also willing to discuss prospective ideas for papers prior to the submission of abstracts.
Registration fee: £100
Bookmark and Share