Stanford Law’s Jennifer Granick Wins Palmer Prize for New Book

Jennifer Granick, Stanford Law School lecturer-in-law and Director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society was named the winner of the 2016 IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law/Roy C. Palmer Civil Liberties Prize for her book American Spies: Modern Surveillance, Why You Should Care, and What to Do About It.

Jennifer Granick preferred photo
Jennifer Granick

The award, announced December 12 in Chicago, honors an exemplary work of scholarship exploring the tension between civil liberties and national security in contemporary American society.

Granick’s book, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in early 2017, 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.

Granick is the Director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society (CIS). From 2001 to 2007, Granick was Executive Director of CIS and taught Cyberlaw, Computer Crime Law, Internet intermediary liability, and Internet law and policy. From 2007 to 2010 she served as the Civil Liberties Director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Granick practices, speaks, and writes about computer crime and security, electronic surveillance, security vulnerability disclosure, encryption policy, and the Fourth Amendment. In March of 2016, she received Duo Security’s Women in Security Academic Award for her expertise in the field as well as her direction and guidance for young women in the security industry. Before teaching at Stanford, Granick spent almost a decade practicing criminal defense law in California.

A second Palmer Prize was awarded to SLS alumna Laura Donohue, JD ’07, for her book The Future of Foreign Intelligence: Privacy and Surveillance in the Digital Age. The book, published by Oxford University Press in 2016, 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. 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.

The IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law/Roy C. Palmer Civil Liberties Prize was established to encourage and reward public debate among scholars on current issues affecting the rights of individuals and the responsibilities of governments throughout the world. The prize was established in 2007 by IIT Chicago-Kent alumnus Roy C. Palmer and his wife, Susan M. Palmer.

About Stanford Law School

Stanford Law School is one of the nation’s leading institutions for legal scholarship and education. Its alumni are among the most influential decision makers in law, politics, business and high technology. Faculty members argue before the Supreme Court, testify before Congress, produce outstanding legal scholarship and empirical analysis, and contribute regularly to the nation’s press as legal and policy experts. Stanford Law School has established a new model for legal education that provides rigorous interdisciplinary training, hands-on experience, global perspective and focus on public service, spearheading a movement for change.

About the Stanford Center for Internet and Society

The Center for Internet and Society (CIS) is a public interest technology law and policy program at Stanford Law School and a part of Law, Science and Technology Program at Stanford Law School. CIS brings together scholars, academics, legislators, students, programmers, security researchers, and scientists to study the interaction of new technologies and the law and to examine how the synergy between the two can either promote or harm public goods like free speech, innovation, privacy, public commons, diversity, and scientific inquiry. CIS strives to improve both technology and law, encouraging decision makers to design both as a means to further democratic values. CIS provides law students and the general public with educational resources and analyses of policy issues arising at the intersection of law, technology and the public interest.  CIS also sponsors a range of public events including a speaker series, conferences and workshops. CIS was founded by Lawrence Lessig in 2000.