Foreword

America now is a society addicted to legalism that has lost its faith in legal argument. The impeachment of Bill Clinton was only the most visible manifestation of this paradox. Both Democrats and Republicans professed a rhetorical commitment to the rule of law while revealing a deep pessimism about the ability of courts, legislatures, or even citizens to transcend their biases and to converge, through deliberation, on impartial and democratically acceptable outcomes. The simplistic Supreme Court decisions that precipitated the impeachment - in particular, Morrison v. Olson,1 upholding the Independent Counsel law, and Jones v. Clinton,2 denying the President temporary immunity from civil suits while in office - were based on the principle that the President should not be above the law, a principle repeatedly invoked by both parties in the House and the Senate; but the content of the congressional deliberations revealed an unsettling cynicism about the malleability of legal argument. Both sides embraced interpretive methodologies that they had rejected on previous occasions, as the President\u27s accusers praised the virtues of a living Constitution while the President\u27s defenders insisted on the importance of original understanding. Perhaps most jarringly, after declining to engage each other\u27s arguments, the two parties in the House and Senate divided more or less along party lines. The partisan character of the votes on the articles of impeachment seemed to reinforce the partisan character of law itself

The Purposes of Privacy: A Response

In this essay, Jeffrey Rosen responds to eight articles about his recent book, The Unwanted Gaze, published as part of a special symposium issue of the Georgetown Law Journal. The eight contributors to the symposium were Professors Anita Allen, Julie Cohen, Rosa Ehrenreich, Lawrence Lessig, Sanford Levinson, Robert Post, Jed Rubenfeld and Nadine Strossen. Rosen defends his argument that privacy protects against the dangers of being judged out of context, insisting that invasions of privacy can lead to social misinterpretations that constitute an injury distinct from injuries to dignity or autonomy. He expands on his claim that some of the indignities currently defined as gender discrimination under sexual harassment law are better conceived as invasions of privacy, and he explores the distinction between offenses against honor and offenses against dignity. Finally, he discusses the tensions between privacy and free speech, insisting that the most appropriate remedies for social misunderstanding are often social rather than legal

Striking it Rich by Data Mining

AbstractIn this issue of Cell, Lamb et al. have used a combination of molecular genetics, DNA microarray, and data mining of human tumor expression databases to identify a cdk-independent mechanism by which the interaction of cyclin D1 with the transcription factor C/EBPβ may mediate tumorigenesis