William Harrison Prosser Correspondence

Entries include brief biographical information, a typed biography, and typed correspondence with the Maine State Library

Rapes seldom reported

Statistics from the Rape Crisis Center in Bangor suggest that for every rape reported at UMO each year, 10 others have probably occurred, said UMO\u27s assistant director of police services William Prosser. The Rape Crisis Center bases unreported rape figures on calls [it] gets for assistance compared to the number of police reports generated due to rape, Prosser said

Program from the Sixth Thomas M. Cooley Lectures

The program from the sixth Thomas M. Cooley lectures, held February 2-6, 1953, at the University of Michigan Law School. The lecture series was Selected Topics on the Law of Torts by William Lloyd Prosser

Gender Issues and the Prosser, Wade, and Schwartz Torts Casebook

Feminist jurisprudence is burgeoning. During the 1980s, there has been much excellent work in areas such as legal theory and practice, women\u27s legal history, and specific substantive fields of law. Some law faculty also have analyzed gender bias in legal casebooks. Moreover, the eighth edition of William Prosser\u27s renowned Cases and Materials on Torts, the most widely used torts casebook in American law schools, is scheduled for classroom use in the autumn of 1988. All of these developments make this a promising time to consider gender issues and Prosser, Wade, and Schwartz. This paper is meant to begin that discussion and to contribute to the broader work on feminist issues m progress. The first section of the piece affords a general examination of many aspects of the Prosser casebook that involve issues of gender. This overview should enhance the understanding of readers, especially those persons not accustomed to thinking consciously in terms of gender, while providing a setting for the specific assessment in the second segment of the paper. That section explores how issues implicating gender can arise in the classroom context of learning and teaching from Prosser\u27s materials on affirmative causes of action for intentional torts to persons and privileges to those torts. The final part reflects on the future of gender issues and Prosser, Wade, and Schwartz

Protect from \u27guilt by accusation\u27

In regard to your article pertaining to the Penobscot Superior Court dropping charges against [a University of Maine student]. I feel your paper has done a grave injustice…by printing the comments of Assistant Director of the Department of Police and Safety William Prosser

A Taxonomy of Privacy

Privacy is a concept in disarray. Nobody can articulate what it means. As one commentator has observed, privacy suffers from an embarrassment of meanings. Privacy is far too vague a concept to guide adjudication and lawmaking, as abstract incantations of the importance of privacy do not fare well when pitted against more concretely-stated countervailing interests. In 1960, the famous torts scholar William Prosser attempted to make sense of the landscape of privacy law by identifying four different interests. But Prosser focused only on tort law, and the law of information privacy is significantly more vast and complex, extending to Fourth Amendment law, the constitutional right to information privacy, evidentiary privileges, dozens of federal privacy statutes, and hundreds of state statutes. Moreover, Prosser wrote over 40 years ago, and new technologies have given rise to a panoply of new privacy harms. A new taxonomy to understand privacy violations is thus sorely needed. This article develops a taxonomy to identify privacy problems in a comprehensive and concrete manner. It endeavors to guide the law toward a more coherent understanding of privacy and to serve as a framework for the future development of the field of privacy law

Privacy\u27s Other Path: Recovering the Law of Confidentiality

The familiar legend of privacy law holds that Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis invented the right to privacy in 1890, and that William Prosser aided its development by recognizing four privacy torts in 1960. In this article, Professors Richards and Solove contend that Warren, Brandeis, and Prosser did not invent privacy law, but took it down a new path. Well before 1890, a considerable body of Anglo-American law protected confidentiality, which safeguards the information people share with others. Warren, Brandeis, and later Prosser turned away from the law of confidentiality to create a new conception of privacy based on the individual\u27s inviolate personality. English law, however, rejected Warren and Brandeis\u27s conception of privacy and developed a conception of privacy as confidentiality from the same sources used by Warren and Brandeis. Today, in contrast to the individualistic conception of privacy in American law, the English law of confidence recognizes and enforces expectations of trust within relationships. Richards and Solove explore how and why privacy law developed so differently in America and England. Understanding the origins and developments of privacy law\u27s divergent paths reveals that each body of law\u27s conception of privacy has much to teach the other

Privacy\u27s Other Path: Recovering the Law of Confidentiality

The familiar legend of privacy law holds that Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis invented the right to privacy in 1890, and that William Prosser aided its development by recognizing four privacy torts in 1960. In this article, Professors Richards and Solove contend that Warren, Brandeis, and Prosser did not invent privacy law, but took it down a new path. Well before 1890, a considerable body of Anglo-American law protected confidentiality, which safeguards the information people share with others. Warren, Brandeis, and later Prosser turned away from the law of confidentiality to create a new conception of privacy based on the individual\u27s inviolate personality. English law, however, rejected Warren and Brandeis\u27s conception of privacy and developed a conception of privacy as confidentiality from the same sources used by Warren and Brandeis. Today, in contrast to the individualistic conception of privacy in American law, the English law of confidence recognizes and enforces expectations of trust within relationships. Richards and Solove explore how and why privacy law developed so differently in America and England. Understanding the origins and developments of privacy law\u27s divergent paths reveals that each body of law\u27s conception of privacy has much to teach the other

A Taxonomy of Privacy

Privacy is a concept in disarray. Nobody can articulate what it means. As one commentator has observed, privacy suffers from an embarrassment of meanings. Privacy is far too vague a concept to guide adjudication and lawmaking, as abstract incantations of the importance of privacy do not fare well when pitted against more concretely-stated countervailing interests. In 1960, the famous torts scholar William Prosser attempted to make sense of the landscape of privacy law by identifying four different interests. But Prosser focused only on tort law, and the law of information privacy is significantly more vast and complex, extending to Fourth Amendment law, the constitutional right to information privacy, evidentiary privileges, dozens of federal privacy statutes, and hundreds of state statutes. Moreover, Prosser wrote over 40 years ago, and new technologies have given rise to a panoply of new privacy harms. A new taxonomy to understand privacy violations is thus sorely needed. This article develops a taxonomy to identify privacy problems in a comprehensive and concrete manner. It endeavors to guide the law toward a more coherent understanding of privacy and to serve as a framework for the future development of the field of privacy law

Prosser\u27s Privacy Law: A Mixed Legacy

This Article examines the complex ways in which William Prosser shaped the development of the American law of tort privacy. Although Prosser certainly gave tort privacy an order and legitimacy that it had previously lacked, he also stunted its development in ways that limited its ability to adapt to the problems of the Information Age. His skepticism about privacy, as well as his view that tort privacy lacked conceptual coherence, led him to categorize the law into a set of four narrow categories and strip it of any guiding concept to shape its future development. Prosser’s legacy for tort privacy law is thus a mixed one: He greatly increased the law’s stature at the cost of giving it no guidance and making it less able to adapt to new circumstances in the future. If tort privacy is to remain vital in a digital age, it must move beyond Prosser’s conception