Professor Brownstein Comments on Supreme Court Ruling for NPR
Professor Alan Brownstein commented on the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Nelson v. NASA for a news report on KPCC, a Southern California National Public Radio affiliate. The Court decided that personal background checks imposed by the federal government on employees working on government-funded projects did not violate the employees' right to privacy.
Professor Brownstein said he was not surprised by the unanimous ruling. "Freedom from disclosure of private information doesn't have a significant track record on the Court," he said. "There isn't a lot of precedent that protects privacy in the sense of wanting to protect information from public disclosure. To the extent that the Constitution protects that kind of privacy, it typically does so in the limited context of some other constitutional provision and not the non-enumerated right to privacy."
Professor Brownstein, a nationally recognized Constitutional Law scholar, teaches Constitutional Law, Law and Religion, and Torts at UC Davis School of Law, where he holds the Boochever and Bird Endowed Chair for the Study and Teaching of Freedom and Equality.