David Levine’s scholarship published in Michigan and North Carolina law reviews

“The People’s Trade Secrets?”, Levine’s Michigan Telecommunications and Technology Law Review article, was published in Volume 18, Issue 1 of the publication. In this article, Levine examines the way trade secrets and freedom of information laws interact.

“Strangely, the people — citizens of states and the United States — apparently have trade secrets that they themselves cannot see,” Levine writes in his article. “In other words, there is information that the government itself creates on its own (a “government trade secret”) and that courts and attorneys general have found meet the applicable definition of a trade secret. This Article examines whether a government trade secret should be allowed to exist and, if so, whether governments should be allowed to shield government trade secrets from public disclosure.”

Levine’s North Carolina Law Review article, entitled, “The Social Layer of Freedom of Information Law,” was published in Volume 90, Issue 5 of the publication. In this article, Levine discusses governmental use of social media and the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

“This Article argues that, from a theoretical perspective, governments should reorient their thinking about social media to focus on its indirect value as an information formatting construct rather than as purely a direct tool for distributing information,” Levine writes. “From a practical perspective and to meet this theoretical imperative, FOIA can be modestly amended to allow for the public’s development and exploitation of the social layer of government information.”

Levine is an Associate Professor of Law at Elon and an affiliate scholar at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School (CIS). He is the founder and host of Hearsay Culture on KZSU-FM, a technology and intellectual property law radio show and podcast.