September 5, 2013 Upcoming Law Library Lectures to Explore the U.S. Constitution, Privacy Act

Press Contact: Audrey Fischer (202) 707-0022
Public Contact: Jeanine Cali (202) 707-4642

The Law Library of Congress will host two programs in September that will explore the changing nature of the law. Both events are free and open to the public and will be held in the Montpelier Room, on the sixth floor of the Library of Congress James Madison Memorial Building, 101 Independence Ave. S.E., Washington, D.C. Tickets are not required.

In recognition of Constitution Day 2013, at 1 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 17, law professor Risa L. Goluboff will deliver a lecture titled "How the Constitution Changes: Social and Political Aspects of the Law." In her lecture, sponsored by the Friends of the Law Library of Congress, Goluboff will describe how social movements, judges, lawyers, legislators, administrators and community pressure all contribute to new understandings of the U.S. Constitution. To illustrate these forces, she will draw from her current book project on the changing constitutional status of vagrancy laws in the 1960s and 1970s as part of the social transformation of that era.

Goluboff is a professor of law and history at the University of Virginia (UVA). She teaches constitutional law, civil-rights litigation, and legal and constitutional history, and she directs UVA’s joint J.D.-M.A. program in history. In 2011, she received the University of Virginia’s All-University Teaching Award. She is an affiliated GAGE scholar at the Miller Center and a faculty affiliate at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies. In 2012, Goluboff was named a distinguished lecturer by the Organization of American Historians. Her book, “The Lost Promise of Civil Rights” (Harvard University Press, 2007), explores varying understandings of civil rights in the era before “Brown v. Board of Education.” The book was co-winner of the 2008 James Willard Hurst Prize, awarded by the Law and Society Association for the best work in socio-legal history. Goluboff is also co-editor (with Myriam Gilles) of “Civil Rights Stories” (Foundation Press, 2008). Goluboff graduated summa cum laude with an A.B. from Harvard College, in history and sociology. She earned a J.D. from Yale Law School, and a Ph.D. in history from Princeton University.

At 11:30 a.m. on Monday, Sept. 30, the Law Library of Congress will present the final lecture of the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Foundation Program on Demography, Technology and Criminal Justice. The lecture will be given by law professor Orin S. Kerr, the Law Library Scholar-in-Residence for the Guggenheim Program.

Kerr will discuss his article, “The Next Generation Privacy Act,” which has been accepted for publication in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. In the article, he argues that Congress should repeal the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 (18 USC 2510), which regulates government access to Internet records and replaces it with a new statute that reflects current technologies and addresses privacy threats.

The Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Foundation awarded a $150,000 grant to the Library of Congress in the fall of 2011 to support a program on demography, technology and criminal justice. Kerr was appointed in May 2012 as the scholar-in-residence for the program. He is a tenured professor of law at George Washington University, where he teaches criminal law, criminal procedure and computer-crime law. The focus of his academic research has been on how new technologies change criminal law and criminal investigations. His work in this area has been cited in more than 70 judicial decisions, including in the U.S. Supreme Court’s January 2012 decision in United States v. Jones on the constitutionality of the warrantless use of GPS monitoring. Kerr’s articles have been published in many leading law reviews, including the Harvard Law Review and the Yale Law Journal.

In March 2013, Kerr testified twice before the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security and Investigations. The topics of his testimony were “Investigating and Prosecuting 21st-Century Cyber Threats,” concerning the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), and the reform of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), which regulates government access to Internet communications and records.

Founded in 1800, the Library of Congress is the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution. The Library seeks to spark imagination and creativity and to further human understanding and wisdom by providing access to knowledge through its magnificent collections, programs, publications and exhibitions. Many of the Library’s rich resources can be accessed through its website at www.loc.gov.

The Law Library was founded in 1832 with the mission to make its resources available to members of Congress, the Supreme Court, other branches of the U.S. government and the global legal community, and to sustain and preserve a universal collection of law for future generations. With more than 2.6 million volumes, the Law Library contains the world’s largest collection of law books and other resources from all countries and provides online databases and guides to legal information worldwide through its website at www.loc.gov/law/.

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PR 13-150
2013-09-05
ISSN 0731-3527