THE UNWANTED GAZE

A comprehensive and disturbing assessment of the often well-intentioned legal efforts that have culminated in a multi-pronged assault on civic notions of privacy and discretion—usefully epitomized by the Lewinsky affair.

Rosen (George Washington Univ. Law School/New Republic) deftly examines the daunting web of our wired, voyeuristic culture in developing a well-modulated argument for individual privacy in the public sphere. Much of Rosen’s thesis revolves around such diverse phenomena as sexual-harassment law and the increasingly commonplace workplace monitoring of e-communication. Yet Rosen is also concerned with what he persuasively views as a generalized whittling-down of the sanctity of the citizen’s space and “papers,” noting that protections guaranteed in landmark 18th- and 19th-century decisions have been tarnished by recent, infamous proceedings like the Bob Packwood affair (alongside less notorious but interesting cases). Still, Rosen is not tremendously polemical: his arguments are subtly modulated, combining sophisticated legal discussion with a keen sense of our contemporary scene’s foibles, funny and otherwise (as in Bill Clinton’s ironic support for Susan Molinari’s amendments regarding evidence admission to his 1994 crime bill, which later facilitated the Paula Jones lawsuit). Structurally, Rosen follows a sleek line, with simply titled chapters like “Privacy at Home” and “Privacy at Work” that allows his study to function both as an over-arching narrative of this grandiose erosion of the private society and as a handbook for those concerned enough to contemplate resistance, at least on the personal or community level. Such individuals may be most alarmed by the chapter “Privacy in Cyberspace,” which presents recent controversial cases—such as that of a Harvard Divinity School dean ousted for downloading pornography—and describes how every e-mail is centrally preserved and every online move tracked.

Rosen ably navigates these murky waters where sexual-harassment, libel, and invasion of privacy jurisprudence intersect with the mutated informational boundaries of cyberspace; his debut is a cohesive, attractive, and informative take on a truly unsettling, even grotesque face of contemporary life.