Privacy in Law and Society
Duration:
1 Teaching Period
Unit Code:
LAW20038
Contact Hours:
Recommended 10 hours of study per week
About this unit
This unit introduces students to various social and cultural understandings of ‘privacy’ and how they are articulated into ‘privacy law’. The goal is to give students a theoretically sophisticated understanding of the different social and legal understandings of privacy; the values that privacy law protects, the historical evolution of different privacy protecting legal actions; the way gender, race, sex and class influence experiences and meanings of ‘privacy’; and privacy’s increasingly complex relationship with media, technology and surveillance. The evolution of privacy law is also considered.
Content
Students who successfully complete this unit will be able to:
- Analyse and evaluate contemporary debates over the role and nature of privacy law
- Examine privacy law’s relationship to government and commercial entities
- Discuss the development and evolution of privacy law in its historical and social context
- Conduct effective legal research of both primary and secondary legal materials, as well as relevant interdisciplinary materials