Pennoyer Was Right

Pennoyer v. Neff has a bad rap. As an original matter, Pennoyer is legally correct. Compared to current doctrine, it offers a more coherent and attractive way to think about personal jurisdiction and interstate relations generally. To wit: The Constitution imposes no direct limits on personal jurisdiction. Jurisdiction isn\u27t a matter of federal law, but of general law -- that unwritten law, including much of the English common law and the customary law of nations, that formed the basis of the American legal system. Founding-era states were free to override that law and to exercise more expansive jurisdiction. But if they did, their judgments wouldn\u27t be recognized elsewhere, in other states or in federal courts -- any more than if they\u27d tried to redraw their borders. As Pennoyer saw, the Fourteenth Amendment changed things by enabling direct federal review of state judgments, rather than making parties wait to challenge them at the recognition stage. It created a federal question of what had been a general one: whether a judgment was issued with jurisdiction, full stop, such that the deprivation of property or liberty it ordered would be done with due process of law. Reviving Pennoyerwould make modern doctrine make more sense. As general-law principles, not constitutional decrees, jurisdictional doctrines could be adjusted by international treaty—or overridden through Congress’s enumerated powers. The Due Process Clause gives these rules teeth without determining their content, leaving space for federal rules to govern our federal system. In the meantime, courts facing jurisdictional questions should avoid pitched battles between “sovereignty” and “liberty,” looking instead to current conventions of general and international law. Pennoyer’s reasoning can be right without International Shoe’s outcome being wrong; international law and American practice might just be different now than they were in 1878 or 1945. But if not, at least we’ll be looking in the right place. General law may not be much, but it’s something: the conventional settlement of the problems of political authority at the root of any theory of personal jurisdiction. Recovering those conventions is not only useful for its own sake, but a step toward appreciating our deep dependence on shared traditions of general law

Privacy and Confidentiality in an e-Commerce World: Data Mining, Data Warehousing, Matching and Disclosure Limitation

The growing expanse of e-commerce and the widespread availability of online databases raise many fears regarding loss of privacy and many statistical challenges. Even with encryption and other nominal forms of protection for individual databases, we still need to protect against the violation of privacy through linkages across multiple databases. These issues parallel those that have arisen and received some attention in the context of homeland security. Following the events of September 11, 2001, there has been heightened attention in the United States and elsewhere to the use of multiple government and private databases for the identification of possible perpetrators of future attacks, as well as an unprecedented expansion of federal government data mining activities, many involving databases containing personal information. We present an overview of some proposals that have surfaced for the search of multiple databases which supposedly do not compromise possible pledges of confidentiality to the individuals whose data are included. We also explore their link to the related literature on privacy-preserving data mining. In particular, we focus on the matching problem across databases and the concept of ``selective revelation'' and their confidentiality implications.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/088342306000000240 in the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Alaska Office of Victims’ Rights: A Model for America

En utmärkande egenskap hos nästintill all dagens teknik är att den innehar funktioner med syfte att utöka och stödja människans kognitiva förmågor. Det kan vara funktioner som stödjer vårt minne, som styr vår uppmärksamhet eller hjälper oss att planera och organisera aktiviteter. I Sverige har det blivit allt vanligare att teknologi i form av smartphones, surfplattor och datorer används på ett utbrett sätt i elevernas skolgång. Enligt tidigare forskning är däremot lärarnas inre föreställningar och attityder gentemot teknologin en avgörande faktor för huruvida lärarna i slutändan väljer att integrera teknologin i sin undervisning, och på vilket sätt som de väljer att göra detta. Den aktuella studiens syfte var att undersöka lärarnas föreställningar och attityder gentemot fem kognitiva funktioner som finns i teknologiska enheter som smartphones och surfplattor. Dessa fem funktioner var en larmfunktion, en vägledande funktion, en funktion som kan spara och presentera information, en distraherande funktion samt en påminnelsefunktion. Studien genomfördes med en internetbaserad enkät som skickades ut till 416 lärare på grundskole- och gymnasienivå i de tre kommunerna Linköping, Mjölby och Borlänge. Det slutliga deltagarantalet var 39 lärare som besvarade hela enkäten. Enkäten innehöll både slutna frågor med förvalda svarsalternativ, samt öppna frågor som lärarna besvarade fritt. Det insamlade materialet analyserades sedan med en statistisk analys av de slutna frågorna och med en tematisk analys av de öppna frågorna. Resultatet visade att lärarna uppskattade en funktion som kan spara och presentera information som den funktion som vore mest förmånligt för elevernas lärande. Det var även den funktion som flest lärare kunde tänka sig att rekommendera till någon av sina elever. Påminnelsefunktionen och den vägledande funktionen var de två funktioner som uppskattades som mest förmånliga för såväl relationerna mellan eleverna, samt för lärarnas relationer till eleverna. Alarmfunktionen var däremot den funktion som uppskattades som minst förmånlig för alla dessa tre aspekter. Studiens resultat kan fungera som vägledning för utvecklare av tekniska kognitiva stödfunktioner som används i pedagogiska ändamål. Genom att studera varför lärarna accepterar eller avvisar olika former av teknologi i klassrummet så kan man få fram vilka faktorer som är avgörande för en framgångsrik teknikintegration i undervisningen. Man kan även påvisa vilka mönster som finns vid användandet av teknik i undervisningen, som till exempel under vilka förhållanden som lärare anser att tekniken ger mest fördelar och på vilket sätt de anser att tekniken förändrar lärandemiljön och relationerna i skolan. <img src="https://ssl.gstatic.com/ui/v1/icons/mail/images/cleardot.gif" /

The Uneasy Case for the Affordable Care Act

The constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act is sometimes said to be an easy question, with the Act\u27s opponents relying more on fringe political ideology than mainstream legal arguments. This essay disagrees. While the mandate may win in the end, it won\u27t be easy, and the arguments against it sound in law rather than politics. Written to accompany and respond to Erwin Chemerinsky\u27s essay in the same symposium, this essay argues that each substantive defense of the mandate is subject to doubt. While Congress could have avoided the issue by using its taxing power, it chose not to do so. Congress has power to regulate commerce among the several States, but that might not extend to every individual decision involving economic considerations -- walking rather than taking the bus, stargazing rather than renting movies, or carrying a gun in a school zone rather than hiring private bodyguards. Even the necessary-and-proper power, the strongest ground for the mandate, may stop short of letting Congress claim extraordinary powers to fix the problems created by its exercise of ordinary ones. Because the mandate\u27s opponents can find some support in existing doctrines, a decision striking down the mandate needn\u27t be a drastic break from past practice. By contrast, a decision upholding the mandate would raise serious questions about the limits of Congress\u27s powers. To many, these questions offer good reasons for doubting whether existing doctrine gets it right -- reasons having more to do with constitutional theory than political preference