Geoff Manne on Choice of Law for Privacy

ICLE President Geoffrey A. Manne was cited in a column in Forbes about his proposal for a “choice-of-law” system for privacy law. You can read the full piece here.

A legislative alternative that could avoid difficult cost-benefit analysis while reducing the growing burden of proliferating state privacy regulation has been advanced by scholars Geoffrey Manne of the International Center for Law and Economics and Jim Harper of the American Enterprise Institute:

“[W]e propose a federal statute requiring states to recognize contractual choice-of-law provisions, so companies and consumers can choose what state privacy law to adopt. Privacy would continue to be regulated at the state level. However, the federal government would provide for jurisdictional competition among states, and companies operating nationally could comply with the privacy laws of any one state. Unlike a single federal privacy law, this approach would provide 50 competing privacy regimes for national firms. Protecting choice of law can trigger competition and innovation in privacy practices while preserving a role for meaningful state privacy regulation.”