ABSTRACT
Several years ago as a doctoral student, I took a privacy law class at the Indiana University law school. Privacy law was then, and still is, quite a hot legal topic. After taking the class, I decided I wanted to do some type of research in the area. At the time, every state had either passed or proposed some sort of privacy legislation. One piece of legislation in particular-the federal Driver’s Privacy Protection Act-appeared to have some serious implications for journalists. Many journalists and lawyers had written about the potentially damaging effects of this Act, but none had taken a social science approach to look at what might be lost if driver’s license records were closed off from the public and the media. The legal question at hand was, “How does limiting previously public record information in databases affect the way journalists do their jobs?”
