Two books about government surveillance win 2016 Palmer Civil Liberties Prize
The 2016 Chicago-Kent College of Law/Roy C. Palmer Civil Liberties Prize has been awarded to Laura K. Donohue for her book The Future of Foreign Intelligence: Privacy and Surveillance in the Digital Age (Oxford University Press 2016) and to Jennifer Stisa Granick for her book American Spies: Modern Surveillance, Why You Should Care, and What to Do About It (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2017).
Established in 2007 by Chicago-Kent alumnus Roy C. Palmer and his wife, Susan M. Palmer, the Palmer Prize honors exemplary works of scholarship exploring the tension between civil liberties and national security in contemporary American society. The winners will present their books at Chicago-Kent.
Laura Donohue is a professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center, the director of Georgetown's Center on National Security and the Law, and a director of Georgetown's Center on Privacy and Technology. Her scholarship focuses on constitutional law, legal history, emerging technologies, and national security law. Her award-winning book The Future of Foreign Intelligence chronicles how the Fourth Amendment right to privacy has been weakened by mass government surveillance programs following the 9/11 attacks and offers solutions to rein in the reach of the national security state.
Jennifer Granick is a lecturer-in-law at Stanford Law School and the director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. Granick practices, speaks, and writes about computer crime and security, electronic surveillance, security vulnerability disclosure, encryption policy, and the Fourth Amendment. In her award-winning book American Spies, Granick shows how surveillance law has fallen behind surveillance technology, giving American spies vast new power, and guides the reader through proposals for reining in massive surveillance with the ultimate goal of surveillance reform.
Benefactor Roy Palmer, a lawyer and real estate developer, is a 1962 honors graduate of Chicago-Kent and a former member of its board of overseers. Palmer is the recipient of the Chicago-Kent Alumni Association's 2012 Distinguished Service Award and was named by the law school in 2013 as one of "125 Alumni of Distinction." He and his wife, Susan, are active in numerous civic, social and philanthropic organizations.
Founded in 1888, Chicago-Kent College of Law is the law school of Illinois Institute of Technology, also known as Illinois Tech, a private, technology-focused, research university offering undergraduate and graduate degrees in engineering, science, architecture, business, design, human sciences, applied technology, and law.
