The University of Chicago Law School Faculty Blog

The Centenarian Who Wasn’t, NASA v. Nelson, and the Constitutional Right to Information Privacy

Approximately thirty years ago, Sogen Kato became involved in an argument with his relatives, and then retreated into his bedroom to sleep.  He never came out.  Evidently none of the family members who shared his apartment went in to disturb him.  This past July, after Kato ostensibly became Tokyo’s oldest living man, Japanese government officials sought to contact him to congratulate him on his longevity.  After being given the run-around by his nervous relatives as to his availability, government officials eventually showed up at Kato’s apartment and discovered his mummified remains in the bedroom.  His reprehensible relatives, who collected more than $100,000 in pension benefits in Kato’s name during his “lifetime,” are in very hot water. 

The constitutional right to information privacy is the law’s equivalent of Sogen Kato.  It has been thirty-three years since the Supreme Court hinted that such a right exists under the Constitution, and the Court has been as silent as Kato in the interim about this subject.  The lower courts have had much more to say, with most circuit courts holding definitively that the Constitution protects a right to informational privacy and developing multi-part tests to determine when it has been infringed.  The D.C. Circuit has expressed skepticism about whether the constitutional right lives on, and the Sixth Circuit has held that until the Supreme Court says otherwise, the constitutional right to information privacy is dead.  On October 5, the U.S. Supreme Court is going to be opening the bedroom door, and considering oral argument in its first constitutional right to information privacy case in a generation, NASA v. Nelson.

In Nelson the Court will take up the issue of whether the constitutional right to information privacy prohibits the Jet Propulsion Laboratories (JPL) from asking open-ended questions about whether longtime JPL employees have done anything that might reflect negatively on their ability to continue performing their jobs.  My view of Nelson, which I develop at much greater length in Reunifying Privacy Law (forthcoming in the California Law Review), is that the Court ought to hold in Nelson that there is no such thing as a constitutional right to information privacy.  My primary basis for concluding that the constitutional right ought to simply go away is that the constitutional right to information privacy is largely redundant with privacy tort law.  Because the Solicitor General decided not to argue that the Supreme Court should follow the Sixth Circuit’s approach, the briefs in Nelson have largely ignored the question of what happens if the Court holds that this constitutional right should disappear.  But it would be very fruitful for the Justices to ask counsel hard questions along these lines next month.  The answer in Nelson itself appears to be that abolition of the constitutional claim would leave the plaintiffs with robust remedies under tort law.

Vernor v. Autodesk: Copyright, Software Upgrades and Secondary Markets

Earlier today, the Ninth Circuit decided an important case about the scope of the first sale doctrine in copyright as applied to computer software. In Vernor v. Autodesk, the court concluded that the documents in question created a license rather than a sale of the underlying software with the consequence that copyright’s first-sale doctrine did not apply. Early commentary—at least of the 140 character kind on Twitter—is largely critical. The case is one of statutory interpretation and, for the Ninth Circuit, figuring out what some of its earlier software cases had said. The case raises some broad issues regarding copyright and secondary markets, but there is a narrower issue regarding software upgrades embedded in the case and that is the one I want to focus on here.