Tulane scholar available to comment on privacy

Amy Gajda, a professor at the Tulane University School of Law, is one of the nation’s leading scholars on privacy, and her new book on the subject is proof of her expertise.

In Seek and Hide: The Tangled History of the Right to Privacy, Gajda examines the history of privacy to show just how long the struggle has been to balance privacy interests against the right of the press to gather and report the news.

The book has received significant praise nationally, including being named by the New York Times as one of the spring season’s most anticipated non-fiction books.

“Like many journalists, I understand how privacy interests impact news coverage and that tension is there in the law as well,” said Gajda, a former news anchor and reporter.

Gajda, the Class of 1937 Professor of Law at Tulane Law School, identifies several scenarios and court decisions that profoundly affected journalism ethics and issues of privacy across the nation. While the courts once swung definitively to protect press and publication freedoms and the right to free speech, she says they are increasingly siding with the right to privacy.

That, she says, can have negative consequences. Too little privacy can mean high profits for those exposing secrets and pain for those exposed. But too much privacy allows the rich, famous and powerful to shield themselves in secrecy.

At Tulane, Gajda teaches several courses that involve media and the law, at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. At Tulane Law School, the courses include Torts, Media Law and Privacy Law. On the undergraduate level, she teaches Communications Law and Introduction to Law and Legal Process.

Seek and Hide is Gajda’s third book.

Her earlier books, probing the limits of First Amendment protection for academia and the press, were published by Harvard University Press. She has also co-authored two casebooks.