Northwestern Pritzker Law Professor Publishes Open-Access Privacy Law Casebook

Privacy law is as a rapidly evolving field, constantly changing to catch up with technological advancements and increased surveillance worldwide. With new privacy laws being passed every year, law school courses must also evolve.

Matthew Kugler, Professor of Law at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, sought to address this with the publication of his open-access textbook, Privacy Law: Cases and Materials. When teaching an intellectual property course, he made liberal use of an open-access casebook by Barton Beebe, and he realized that no such book existed for privacy law. “The leading casebook in privacy costs about $300,” said Kugler. “That’s a lot of money being spent by a lot of students, year after year.” This became the major motivation in both writing the book and making it open access.

Hosting the book online also gives Kugler the freedom to update content as needed, which has proven to be particularly important for privacy law. “I wanted to incorporate some of the cutting-edge topics that my students will encounter out in the world,” said Kugler. “So deepfakes in the context of the right of publicity and nonconsensual pornography, location tracking and the Federal Trade Commission, state privacy laws and the California Consumer Privacy Act. There’s going to be more to say about each of those topics every year….I expect it will be both challenging and rewarding to try to keep on top of new developments.”

Feedback from both students and fellow faculty has been positive, with professors from multiple universities already adopting the book for use in their classes. Kugler views the production of the book as a necessary service to the field and hopes that use of it continues to spread. Creating this sort of comprehensive, open-source casebook “seems to be where legal academia is going. Someone needed to do it for privacy. We all spent thousands on books when we were in law school, but there is no reason why future students should have to do the same.”

Up next for Kugler is a research project on dark patterns: online interfaces that manipulate, confuse, or trick consumers into purchasing goods or services they do not want, or surrendering private personal information. He is also working with a current student, Jordan Birnholtz (JD ’25), to examine how the case law around issues of stalking and harassment has changed in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Counterman v. Colorado in 2023.