_Enlisting Law Enforcement in Corporate Competition_)(June 2006 – Business Crimes Bulletin)(PDF)
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Category Archives: Law
The Right to Record
In this age of citizen activism, recording devices, such as cellphones, tabs and digital video/audio recorders are essential tools for collecting evidence and preserving information about conversations, interviews, and phone calls in which you participate. It is also a good way to document what takes place in a court hearing or public meeting, whether for personal reference or later broadcast over news or social media networks. A number of laws affect your ability to use a recording device in these contexts. Here are some practical tips to help you avoid legal trouble when recording conversations, phone calls, public hearings, and protests. Continue reading The Right to Record
The Presumption of Innocence
The presumption of innocence, an ancient tenet of Criminal Law, is actually a misnomer. According to the U.S. Supreme Court, the presumption of the innocence of a criminal defendant is best described as an assumption of innocence that is indulged in the absence of contrary evidence (Taylor v. Kentucky, 436 U.S. 478, 98S. Ct. 1930, 56 L. Ed. 2d 468 [1978]). It is not considered evidence of the defendant’s innocence, and it does not require that a mandatory inference favorable to the defendant be drawn from any facts in evidence. Continue reading The Presumption of Innocence
Where the right to know comes from
OCTOBER 14, 2015
Wikimedia Commons, treatment by CJR.
IN 2003, DEAN BAQUET, then managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, along with then-Editor John S. Carroll, considered—and ultimately rejected—delaying publication of a damaging story on gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger. Just five days before the October 7 special election, the paper ran the story, which detailed multiple allegations of sexual harassment. Continue reading Where the right to know comes from
Social Media and the Internet: A Story of Privatization
Victoria D. Baranetsky
Abstract
This article will question what role private and public actors assume in the current structure of data collection and what potential rights are violated. To tease out the relationship between the private and government sectors, this article, for sake of argument, accepts as fact that surveillance is a core government function and that data is a public resource collected by private organizations. While those assumptions may be challenged by different definitions of what constitutes a public function, public resource, or mode of collection, this article does not take on those challenges. It also does not ask the normative question of whether data collection should cease or the descriptive inquiry of whether data collection could even be halted if the public wanted it to be.
Rather, this article simply examines the structure surrounding data collection in terms of privatization, and asks whether certain legal doctrines may be triggered, including the Fourth Amendment. To do so, this article will first set out a definition of a privatization and use the military as an example. In Section II, the article will then engage in a short history of the Internet to show how electronic data collection was a core government function later “privatized” by Silicon Valley corporations. Section III will then explain how this dynamic between private and public oversight raises Fourth Amendment concerns. Finally, the Conclusion will then set out suggestions for the future, including a potential justification for new privacy rights.
Recommended Citation
Victoria D. Baranetsky, Social Media and the Internet: A Story of Privatization, 35 Pace L. Rev. 304 (2014)
.pdf available at: http://digitalcommons.pace.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1884&context=plr
An Equal Protection Challenge to Heien v. North Carolina
In Heien v. North Carolina, 135 S.Ct. 530 (2014), the U.S. Supreme Court has issued forth its new edict asserting the Fourth Amendment is not disturbed if a constitutional deprivation occurs because of a police officer’s reasonable mistake of the law. This creates a scheme whereby divergent interpretations of the same statute may produce unequal outcomes, which may ultimately prove to be untenable under the due process and equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. Continue reading An Equal Protection Challenge to Heien v. North Carolina
Camden Civil Rights Project 