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Licensed Unlicensed Requires Authentication Published by De Gruyter March 16, 2019

Privacy Law’s Indeterminacy

  • Ryan Calo

Abstract

Fools rush in.[1]

She who hesitates is lost.[2]

American legal realism numbers among the most important theoretical contributions of legal academia to date. Given the movement’s influence, as well as the common centrality of certain key figures, it is surprising that privacy scholarship in the United States has paid next to no attention to the movement. This inattention is unfortunate for several reasons, including that privacy law furnishes rich examples of the indeterminacy thesis — a key concept of American legal realism — and because the interdisciplinary efforts of privacy scholars to explore extra-legal influences on privacy law arguably further the plot of legal realism itself.


∗ Lane Powell and D. Wayne Gittinger Associate Professor of Law, University of Washington. I’m indebted to Neil Richards, Danielle Keats Citron, and Woodrow Hartzog for their initial insights and to Hanoch Dagan, Ruth Gavison, Anita Allen, Julie Cohen, Helen Nissenbaum, Valerie Steeves, Lisa Austin, Mireille Hildebrandt, Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius and other participants in The Problem of Theorizing Privacy workshop hosted by the Cegla Center at Tel Aviv University. I’m especially grateful for the detailed original and summarized feedback from Alon Jasper and the other editors of Theoretical Inquiries of Law. Cite as: Ryan Calo, Privacy Law’s Indeterminacy, 20 THEORETICAL INQUIRIES L. 33 (2019).


Published Online: 2019-03-16

© 2019 by Theoretical Inquiries in Law

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