Today and tomorrow, I’m up on a hill in an eastern canton of Switzerland, teaching a two-day course on cyberlaw to graduate students at the University of St. Gallen with our friend and colleague Urs Gasser. The format is a good one: a framework for each of the eight, two-hour (!) classes by the prof, and then student papers presented for the balance of the time, plus discussion.
The first up is a student giving quite a nice paper on privacy-enhancing technologies and their relationship to e-commerce. She is emphasizing the broad lack of awareness of privacy-endangering aspects of life online; the series of technologies and legal remedies to which users have access; and the curious, or unfortunate, fact that Internet users have not widely adopted privacy-enhancing technologies, in Europe and elsewhere. So, should the state step in to ensure that we look after our own online data privacy, absent users helping themselves?
A social norm, separating Switzerland and the United States: at the end of a student presentation, I was the only one clapping. Everyone else: rapping on the table. A cool, maybe better, sound.
John Palfrey 
[…] After an intense and wonderful “Law & Economics of Cyberspace”-teaching experience with my friend and colleague John Palfrey, I started working today on my contribution to the upcoming Gruter Institute’s Squaw Valley Conference 2006 on Law, Behavior & the Brain, where I will be participating in a session on Law & Emotion. Here’s the abstract of my presentation, entitled “The Quest for Principles of Emotional Legal Design”: The presentation is intended as a contribution to the emerging field of scholarship at the intersection of law and emotion. However, instead of providing findings of prior research or research in progress, I would like to present and discuss a few hypotheses—and even ask some questions—that mark the very beginning of one of the speaker’s research projects. Two beliefs are the starting point for my inquiry. First, I argue that the law & emotion scholarship has made a strong case why, in fact, emotions are of relevance to the legal system. Second, I suggest that in-depth and cross-disciplinary research in the field of law & emotion will soon be complemented by a discussion about what we might call “emotional legal design”, i.e., a discourse about the design principles aimed at guiding the future development of a legal system that takes the findings of law & emotion research serious. Against this backdrop, I will formulate a series of theses that address, inter alia, the following questions: […]
I am an Indian Academic interested in Cyber Laws & IPR. The area of Law & Economics of Cyberspace seems to be of recent origin and your contributions are appreciated which help clarify the subject to us. It would be a privilege to be in touch with your academic pursuits.
Dr. Poolla Murti
Associate Professor / Cyber Laws & IPR
University of Hyderabad / INDIA