Capital Law Professor Receives Fulbright Award

June 12, 2009

Capital University Law School Professor Dennis D. Hirsch has been awarded a prestigious Fulbright Senior Professorship Grant for research and teaching in The Netherlands. Hirsch will lecture on comparative information privacy law at The University of Amsterdam’s Institute for Information Law from January to June 2010. He also will conduct research on innovative Dutch approaches to information privacy regulation.

As a visiting scholar at The University of Amsterdam’s Institute for Information Law, Hirsch will be teaching master level students in a course he is developing that will compare U.S. and European Union approaches to protecting personal information. The new course will examine the philosophical, historical and cultural underpinnings of the two systems, explore the different legal approaches and consider what each system can learn from each other.

“Ultimately, I think this course will generate new ideas to improve the protection of personal information,” said Hirsch.

The research component of Hirsch’s project will examine the Dutch use of “regulatory covenants” to protect personal information and will explore whether this approach might work in the United States. According to Hirsch, privacy regulation in the United Sates is at a crossroads. The need to protect personal information is seen to conflict with the desire to promote economic growth and the Information Economy, resulting in a stalemate for American privacy policies.

Under a covenanting approach government negotiates a set of requirements with an industry sector, rather than prescribing them in a top-down fashion. In some circumstances, the resulting government-industry “covenant” can prove more flexible and cost-effective than traditional, prescriptive rules. The Dutch pioneered the use of covenants for environmental regulation. They have recently begun to use them as a tool for protecting personal information as well.

“Covenants present an intriguing option for transcending the U.S. impasse over privacy regulation,” said Hirsch. “Through my research, I hope to learn more about how regulatory covenants function, whether they provide sufficient transparency and accountability, and how well they work in the privacy context.”

Hirsch, a scholar of both information privacy law and environmental law, grounds his research in an analogy between these two, seemingly unrelated areas of interest: “Just as smokestack industry creates environmental damage, so the Information Economy generates privacy injuries as an inherent by-product of its business activities. My research explores whether the regulatory strategies developed in the environmental field can be adapted for use in protecting personal information. The Dutch use of covenants is a concrete example of how an environmental regulatory method can be employed for privacy protection. The Fulbright award will allow me the opportunity to test my broader theory and shed light on the question of whether 40 years of intellectual debate on environmental laws can provide us with lessons that will help us to develop sound regulations to protect privacy.”

Hirsch anticipates interviewing many Dutch legislators, regulators and industry representatives to inform his research. He also will collaborate with a professor at the University of Utrecht’s Roosevelt Academy who is a scholar of both environmental and privacy law, and will present his ideas at a Roosevelt Academy seminar. Upon his return to the U.S., Hirsch plans to publish the results of his research widely for academia, privacy professionals and policy makers and to present them at conferences and symposia.

“Professor Hirsch is an outstanding and dedicated teacher and scholar and I am thrilled for him that he has been honored with this prestigious Fulbright award,” said Capital University Law School Dean Jack A. Guttenberg. “His research is cutting-edge and an excellent example of how our faculty’s scholarship informs their teaching and how it informs the greater public good.”

Hirsch is the Geraldine W. Howell Professor of Law at Capital University Law School where he teaches environmental law, information privacy law, property law and appellate litigation. He directs Capital’s concentration program in environmental law and previously served as the Law School’s first Associate Dean for Faculty and Student Development. His articles have appeared in the Illinois Law Review, Georgia Law Review, Indiana Law Journal and numerous other legal journals . He is the author of a prize-winning textbook on environmental law practice and a frequent contributor to newspaper op-ed pages. Professor Hirsch serves as counsel to the law firm of Porter Wright Morris & Arthur. He has been a visiting professor at Notre Dame and Drake University law schools. He holds a J.D. from Yale University and a B.A., summa cum laude, from Columbia University.

The Fulbright Program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, is the U.S. government’s most prestigious international exchange program.

The Institute for Information Law is part of the Faculty of Law of the University of Amsterdam. The largest research facility in the field of information law in Europe, it employs more than 25 researchers who actively study and report on a wide range of subjects in the field of information law.

Learn more:

About Professor Dennis D. Hirsch: www.law.capital.edu/Faculty/Bios/dhirsch.asp

About the Fulbright Program: fulbright.state.gov

About The Institute for Information Law: www.ivir.nl/index-english.html