Neil M. Richards

Prosser's 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.

How the law will think about robots (and why you should care)

As robots and robotic devices begin to enter our everyday lives in the coming years, legislation will be written to govern them. This legislation will typically not be written by robot-savvy technologists. It will be written and passed by lawyers and legal scholar, based on their understanding of what a robot is, and what it can do. How we talk to lawmakers about robots and robotics technologies will have a profound impact on what laws are passed and on the legal frameworks that emerge. In this paper, we argue that we must be careful about the metaphors we use to describe our systems when talking to lawmakers, and draw some parallels from the now well-established field of cyberlaw. We briefly discuss what it means to “think like a lawyer”, and show how using different metaphors for our systems could lead to radically different legislation being passed. Finally, we describe and discuss what we call the Android Fallacy; the pitfall of thinking about robots as anything other than (potentially very sophisticated) deterministic machines.