C H A R L E S B A R RY
The symposium presented an unprecedented discussion of legal issues related to a cutting-edge technology....Santa Clara Law students continue to be leaders as they grapple with the issues of the future, and they are helping to lead this law school into our next century. carried out research, published reports and articles, and provided the catalyst for what is still regarded as groundbreaking research. The Computer and High Technology Law Journal published a special issue (Volume 11, Issue 1) on the research. As the twenty-first century dawned, I was repeatedly asked to work on legal issues related to privacy and transportation. I kept the same policy: I agree to assist a project only if it would involve law students as direct participants. Santa Clara Law students are adept at the seemingly endless struggle to reconcile legal ideas, such as privacy, with often unpredictable technologies. As a result, our law students have always been indispensable team members in my privacy and transportation research and audits of transportation technologies. Today, adaptive cruise control has joined antilock brakes in our cars. Automatic toll payments (via FasTrak) have replaced handing coins to toll booth operators to cross Bay Area bridges. We are now looking at the legal ramifications of driverless vehicles as well as at advanced communications systems that
Santa Clara Law students Tijana Martinovic (far left) and Kevin Rogan (far right) were co-editors of the Santa Clara Law Review Symposium edition and organized the national conference on Intelligent Transportation. Greg Larson (second from left), chief of the Office of Traffic Operations for the California Department of Transportation, was one of the many in attendance. Santa Clara Law Professor Dorothy Glancy (second from right), was an adviser to the student organizers.
will permit vehicles to share safety data with other cars at great speed. These technologies were not even on the horizon when I began to teach law students at Santa Clara. It is gratifying to work with the generations of Santa Clara Law students who have led the pace as the newest of new technologies come down the road. That is why the autonomous vehicles symposium just held at Santa Clara caused me to think back about why I came here. It’s the students. Santa Clara Law Professor Dorothy Glancy is nationally known for her extensive work in the area of privacy and transportation law. Under a grant from the Federal Highway Administration of the U.S. Department of Transportation, she directed a legal research project regarding privacy and intelligent transportation systems. She has also been a consultant to the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) in the San Francisco Bay Area, worked with the U.S. Department of Transportation regarding privacy policy issues, and served as a consultant regarding legal and regulatory issues for the United States Department of Transportation’s Rural Interstate Corridor Communications Study Report to Congress (2007). Glancy has taught at Santa Clara University School of Law since 1975, with the exception of brief periods where she served as visiting professor at the University of Arizona and as assistant general counsel at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C. spring/summer 2012 | santa clara law 15