Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law

No one can give us our rights but ourselves. Part of why so many of us are now frantically asking one another “can this be legal?!,” they say, is that we have for too long thought of our Constitution as a document. One that must be interpreted for us and enforced upon us by judges, lawyers and jailers. But no constitutional order can be legitimate if the people can’t make sense of it, and can’t make use of it to deliberate together about their common good. That activity, argues our Executive Director?Emily Tucker?and her co-author David McNeill in a new paper “A Theory of Law for the Next Founding Generation,” is what makes “our Constitution”?our?Constitution. “(U)nless the people are actively fighting to realize equality before the law in their?existing?constitutional order, they are not only abandoning any higher aspirations they hope to realize in their political community, they are at best leaving to chance the end of mutual self-preservation.” Paper available on SSRN:?https://lnkd.in/dDXHuw9U

So many great events in here.

Our Fritz Fellow Marianna Poyares recently published a paper in the journal Critical Times from Duke University Press about immigrant sanctuary and the foundations of solidarity. Based on her four years of ethnographic research with the New Sanctuary Movement, Marianna argues that through transversal alliance-building, sanctuary institutes bonds of community and the legitimate standing of non-citizens. Read the paper, “Border Solidarity: Transversal Alliances and Defiant Territories” at this link: https://lnkd.in/ehPqxHNv!

Georgetown University Law Center students, final deadline to apply for our summer fellowship is today! Questions? Email [email protected].

TOMORROW, 6:30pm EST! Join the Edgelands Institute, No Tech Criminalization in Education (NOTICE) Coalition, & Surveillance Resistance Lab to learn how advocates are fighting back against tech in Houston-area schools aimed at punishing and creating unsafe spaces for students and teachers. Register here: https://lnkd.in/eNhiUJ3p

The 2025 STS?(Science & Technology Studies)?Hub, "Diffracting the critical," is taking place in Berlin this week, March 11-14. Our postdoc Fritz Fellow Marianna Poyares?is one of the panelists. Her presentation "The border at the center: why a critical STS must grapple with border enforcement" argues that new technologies of border and immigration enforcement consist of some of the most extreme forms of surveillance and data extraction frequently disregarding individual and human rights protections, as they operate within the normative equivalent of a state of exception. For programming visit: sts-hub.de/25/

?? NEXT WEEK at 6:30pm ET: Virtual launch of a new report “Houston Diagnostic Report” from Edgelands Institute, No Tech Criminalization in Education (NOTICE) Coalition & Surveillance Resistance Lab to which our Senior Assoc. Clarence Okoh contributed to - as part of the NOTICE coalition’s Ending Youth Surveillance Speaker Series. “TX schools have served as testing grounds for various surveillance technologies…extend(ing) police surveillance in already over-policed neighborhoods [&] exacerbat(ing) racial & socioeconomic inequalities” Register at this link: ?https://lnkd.in/eaRahJiC

Attn: currently enrolled Georgetown University students! Are you interested in issues of privacy, surveillance, civil rights or technology law and policy? We’re looking for self-motivated undergraduate, graduate, and law students to work as legal research assistants for the 2025-2026 academic year. Details and application: https://lnkd.in/e465Vk-N #georgetown #studentjobs #privacy

Happening this Wednesday! Still time to register and hear Veena Dubal, Mark Graham Funda Ustek Spilda and Katie Wells discuss this new report! RSVP: https://lnkd.in/gQTuntuH