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LL.M. Program

Syllabus for Privacy Law

Spring Semester only – 16 weeks and an exam week

I. COURSE DESCRIPTION

There is a natural tension that exists between the entities that attempt to gather information for commercial purposes and the people who try to prevent having that information stored and disseminated over the Internet. Who’s snooping your financial or health information and can they really do that? Questions arise in the context of child protection when a site aimed at juvenals asks for demographic information in the registration template. When a store clerk reads you back your social security number to verify your identity, a flare should go up. When an employer tells you, in your disciplinary review, that you logged onto e-Bay longer than you logged onto the companies extranet, there should be a cold realization that what you considered private, may be used against you in any number of non-judicial ways. Can they really do that, and get away with it?

This course will be taught by a combination of faculty members and will cover privacy concepts in a number of ways. The first is through privacy statutes that have been passed in countries around the world. An emphasis is placed on the United States Federal Trade Commission regulations, and the European Union Directives on Personal Data. The course will deal with the question of whether the government may prescribe the selling or transferring encryption technology abroad, and to what extent governments can us cryptographic means to hack into our personal computers. In the employment context, we will look at what are the acceptable acts of employers in their attempts to protect trade secrets and company data files and servers.

Research is conducted using the Internet WWW as well as, and most importantly, value added databases, such as

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Lexis-Nexis US and foreign materials; Tax Treaties
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BNA US and foreign materials; especially the country by country tax materials
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BNA International
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CCH International databases jurisdiction by jurisdiction, and its global treatises
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CCH USA databases
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Butterworths UK and international materials, especially Commonwealth/Caribbean case law
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QuickLaw, especially Canadian and Commonwealth/Caribbean case law
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Checkpoint-RIA-WGL-Gee, especially the treatises that explain planning techniques by topics, such as estate planning, for jurisdictions
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Westlaw US and foreign materials
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Tax Analysts, especially its superior tax treaty database, foreign law and global tax update magazines
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Foreign Law Publishers - all foreign statues in English
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World Compliance database
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LLM and PhD thesis and dissertation databases
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historical tax research using databases such as Hein and CCH
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Matthew Bender databases
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Lois Law e-libraries
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amongst other databases that we subscribe to for you (see the external links in the classroom for details).

Also, the student should use the electronic book libraries and research the titles available. Finally, the student is encouraged to use the St Thomas law school or university library or another library through a University library exchange program.