My Reflections for Week No. 1 - Kelsey

Being the first week of class, we went over class structure, course information, and were introduced to the right to privacy. We learned how privacy has many definitions and ways it shows up in our lives - technology, surveillance, data, etc. We went on to discuss legal sources of privacy protection - constitutional, statutory, Common Law, and contractual protection.


Not only did I gain perspective on how large-scale privacy truly is, but also on how to frame thinking and justification as done in past legal cases. A big thing we focused on this week was the Katz Test or the Reasonable Expectation of Privacy test. This states a person must exhibit an “actual (subjective) expectation of privacy” and society must recognize the expectation as

reasonable. When discussing the Katz case regarding wiretapping and other applications like the infrared scanners, I was able to start to see the importance of factual circumstances in determining privacy rights. In class when Professor Dryer asked the facts of the case, I was stumped, confused as to what he meant. After walking through a few examples, I started to grasp this better. I found this new perspective of looking at cases to be quite interesting.


I also found learning of the Third-Party Doctrine to be quite eye opening. This states “One has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information that one voluntarily shares with a third party.” While intuitive to some, this was something I never knew or thought about.