President's Pages.

• Author: Plasse, Stephanie

This Symposium issue offers the articles presented at a conference that took place at Stanford Law School on Feb. 6 and 7, 2000. Entitled "Cyberspace and Privacy: A New Legal Paradigm?," the conference was presented by the Stanford Law Review in conjunction with the Stanford Technology Law Review and the Stanford Program in Law Science and Technology.

A central question drove the organization of this millennium Symposium: Has the development of Internet technology gotten ahead of the law that safeguards privacy? But the simple question of how to define privacy turned out to have many facets: the privacy of the space we inhabit, of the personality expressed through our choices and preferences, of the property we own, and of the communications in which we confidentially engage. Indeed, approaching that simple question requires grappling with a variety of legal theories and areas of law: the fragile legal right of privacy itself, the First Amendment, principles of contract formation and trade secrets, and rights in property and intellectual property. Add to that the array of sources of law that compete for authority over privacy: the Constitution, national and state legislation, administrative regulations, and Supreme Court decisions. Not to mention market forces and the technology itself, the so-called law of code.

The collection of articles in this issue tackles the challenge to privacy unleashed by the Internet in all its complexity. While Richard A. Epstein argues that cyberspace has added nothing qualitatively new to the debate over privacy, Anita L. Allen reexamines her earlier writings on privacy in light of the new medium. A group of authors--including Eugene Volokh, Pamela Samuelson, Jonathan Zittrain, Jessica Litman, Joel R. Reidenberg, and Julie E. Cohen--addresses the policy dilemma of regulating the availability of the most intimate personal information over the World Wide Web.

More than 40 legal experts from academia, politics, and the private sector convened at Stanford to discuss the papers published here and debate the future of the law in this area. Our speakers included: Marcia Adams of Hewlett-Packard, Parry Aftab of Aftab & Savitt, Anita Allen of the University of Pennsylvania, John Bentivoglio of the Department of Justice, Barbara Caulfield of Orrick, Herrrington & Sutcliffe, Jeri Clausing of the New York Times and CyberTimes, Julie Cohen of Georgetown...