Citizens’ Rights at Risk During Wartime

By Susan Gluss

In her new book, Habeas Corpus in Wartime, Professor Amanda Tyler offers a searing look at episodes in U.S. history when the federal government undermined its citizens’ legal rights during times of war.

Tyler focuses on the constitutional protection against unlawful imprisonment, or the writ of habeas corpus—and the government’s power to suspend it during conflicts. Her critique reveals an incremental breakdown of habeas corpus, starting with the American Revolution and continuing through the war on terror.

Taking sharp aim at the most egregious instance of illegal detention, the internment of Japanese American citizens during World War II, Tyler questions the extent of executive power that enabled that chapter in U.S. history.

Read the full story here, first posted on the UC Berkeley Law website on 10/23/17.

Privacy Rights May Hinge on Calif. High Court

Read the full story on the UC Berkeley Law School website.

On a late summer night, in July 2012, California resident Paul Macabeo rolled his bicycle through a stop sign. The street was deserted, but, unbeknown to Macabeo, a patrol car with its lights off had been trailing him. As soon as he rode through the sign, the cops pulled him over.

The officers found his cell phone and searched it—without a warrant and without his consent. Scrolling through the phone, they found illegal photos of child pornography. The officers had only intended to cite Macabeo for failure to stop, a minor infraction. But once they discovered the photos, they handcuffed him and locked him up. He was found guilty of a felony and sentenced to five years of probation.

At the time, Macabeo couldn’t have known that his bike ride—and the cell phone search—would lead to a legal battle that could impact millions of Californians.

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Consumers Fooled by Clickbait

Consumers are easily duped by ads masquerading as editorials, according to a new paper by Chris Jay Hoofnagle and Eduard Meleshinsky. Their research shows that these “native ads,” better known as advertorials or clickbait, are becoming harder to differentiate from actual news content. Yet they’re proliferating online at a rapid rate.

Hoofnagle and Meleshinsky surveyed nearly 600 consumers with a typical advertorial embedded in a blog. They found that one in four respondents thought it was written by a reporter or an editor. Although the ad was marked “sponsored content,” it failed to raise a red flag.

Read a longer version of this article on the UC Berkeley School of Law website.

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