Franklin & Marshall College

LANCASTER, Pa. – Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) in Washington, D.C., will discuss "Scientific Evidence and Supreme Court Litigation: The Role of Research in Emerging Privacy Cases" on Wednesday, Feb. 25 at 4:30 p.m. in the Franklin & Marshall's Bonchek Lecture Hall in the Barshi nger Life Sciences and Philosophy Building. The talk, sponsored by the Center for Liberal Arts and Society and the Bonchek Institute for Science and Reason in a Liberal Democracy is free and open to the public.

For almost twenty years, Rotenberg has filed amicus briefs in the United States Supreme Court  to bring the attention of the Justices to emerging civil liberties issues and to set out proposals for how the Court should respond. In January 2009, the Supreme Court issued an important decision in a case concerning the accuracy of criminal justice information systems. In this case, Herring v. United States, the court knocks down an argument that evidence obtained during illegal searches and arrests should be thrown out because it violates the Fourth Amendment. The majority ruled that, as long as the arrest wasn't reckless or deliberate, related evidence could be used. Four of the Justices cited the EPIC amicus in support of their conclusion that legal rules should require police to maintain accurate records.
In this talk, Mr. Rotenberg will review this history, discuss the Herring case, and then describe the need for empirical evidence to help the Court understand the
new challenges to privacy and civil liberties.

Rotenberg teaches information privacy law at Georgetown University Law Center and has testified before Congress on many issues, including access to information, encryption policy, consumer protection, computer security, and communications privacy. He testified before the 9-11 Commission on "Security and Liberty: Protecting Privacy, Preventing Terrorism." He has served on several national and international advisory panels, including the expert panels on Cryptography Policy and Computer Security for the OECD, the Legal Experts on Cyberspace Law for UNESCO, and the Countering Spam program of the ITU. He chairs the ABA Committee on Privacy and Information Protection.

He is a founding board member and former Chair of the Public Interest Registry, which manages the .ORG domain. He is editor of "The Privacy Law Sourcebook" and co-editor (with Daniel J. Solove and Paul Schwartz) of "Information Privacy Law" (Aspen Publishing 2006). He is a graduate of Harvard College and Stanford Law School. He served as Counsel to Senator Patrick J. Leahy on the Senate Judiciary Committee after graduation from law school. He is the recipient of several awards, including the World Technology Award in Law.

FOR MORE INFORMATION: MARCY DUBROFF (717) 291-3837
E-MAIL: MARCY.DUBROFF@FANDM.EDU
WEB: HTTP://WWW.FANDM.EDU