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Professor Schwartz is an important scholar of the interface between the difficult moral concept of privacy and the new information technologies. Someday a book will tell the story of modem history through the lens of privacy: village lives well known to neighbors; the claims of the national state (taxes, military service); the social welfare state; and the possibilities and dangers of modem biology. As Paul Schwartz has written, DNA and other tools can tell us a great deal about ourselves and can improve our lives; they can also tell employers, drug companies, prospective in-laws, and the police things we prefer they not know. Today's privacy questions will seem like nursery school in a few years. My students divide fifty-fifty when asked if they would prefer free local telephone service if each outgoing call were preceded by a fifteen-second commercial, tailored to their calling patterns (you call for pizza, I for sushi). The British publisher of Harry Potter books charges two pounds for a plain-cover copy, which permits an adult to read the book on the London underground without embarrassment. Living Americans can establish descent from Thomas Jefferson. Amazon can use and sell my book-buying tastes. The plastic membership card I use to enter the Museum of Modem Art allows the museum to keep track of my visits. Contemporary thinking about law is well suited for analysis of these issues as they arise. Who should have the "right" to the information? Should we bar sale? What is the appropriate remedy for violation? With information located in cyberspace, what terrestrial jurisdiction's law should control? The Schwartz emphasis is on republican values: how do we, collectively, want to live our lives? It is on the importance of marketguiding structures: what is meaningful consent? what should be the default rule? And it is on the chicken-and-egg direction of influence as norms are formed. Especially with rapidly changing technology, we and our friends are likely to think that what occurs is normal. How can organized society make itself think about whether evolving expectations create the best possible world? Asking these questions, Professor Schwartz chooses several lenses through which to observe incompletenesses and simplifications in standard rhetoric. Yes, there are arguments for decentralization, for markets, for industry self-regulation, and for contract. But yes also, there is need for collective public action and seemingly – horrors- – even for government.

Telecommunications Law is under pressure from fast-paced technological advances and changes in the industry structure. As the high-stakes debates plays itself out in federal and state legislatures, agencies and courts, the academic study is struggling to catch up. The author poses provocative questions about the present and future of Telecommunications Law. Of paramount interest are the ill-fitting legal categories that continue to influence crucial determinations about the level of First Amendment protection accorded various communications media, and the reach of Constitutional Takings doctrine that pits incumbent regulated industries against government regulators and up-start competitors looking to shake-up the established order. This Foreword previews many of the legal issues explored in depth in this Special Issue.

In attempting to predict and prescribe the future, my vision of the recent history of legal education differs from Professor Moliterno's in certain relevant ways. I graduated from Law School in 1967. I learned largely through doctrinal courses that delivered steady training in thinking like a lawyer and information about areas of law. These courses exposed me and my classmates to legal lingo and to the standard types of legal arguments. We learned, largely by hearing the teacher and our fellow students, to make verbal moves and to see the strengths and limitations of others' argumentation skills and techniques. We also learned a great deal about how to argue by dissecting the opinions of appellate judges. In the three decades since I graduated, legal education has changed – improved, in my opinion – in two different ways. First, law professors have broadened and deepened the theoretical stances from which legal dialogue and legal writing are evaluated and criticized. Many of us do not see an independent science of law. We instead consider legal questions as economists, philosophers, theologians, political activists, sociologists, and political scientists. Such professorial viewpoints expose students to many ways of thinking about questions that arise in class. Although their training is often superficial, they do see, and some even become proficient in, various ways to think and argue about legal questions. Second, curricula have incorporated practice opportunities for students. Columbia Law School employs ten percent of its faculty as clinical professors whose full-time job is to supervise eight students each per semester. Various clinical courses guide the students into the profession by taking steps that resemble medical students' first practice experiences. Also at Columbia, recent years have seen a substantial increase in simulation-based instruction. Columbia's curriculum has expanded to include such things as: the week-long intensive ethics experience for third year students; many trial practice sections; and four sections of a simulation-based course in negotiation. Additional efforts are currently on the drawing board.

The American political system is not good at choosing among worthy goals and then adopting programs well designed to achieve the desired purposes. Scholars and activists continue to debate the success and failure of the last quarter century of efforts to reduce inequality and achieve other social reforms. But we have no well developed methodology for evaluating proposed programs and attempting to predict their likely consequences. This Article asks what we know about choosing legal structures for programmatic efforts that seek social change. In particular, it asks whether we can predict relationships between different ways of pursuing public ends and likely outcomes. It does so by exploring various models for additional government involvement in providing care to children with working parents. The subject is timely because many political leaders recognize that demographic changes in the labor force have made the nonworking parent a rare commodity, and that these changes seem irreversible. It seems likely that even at a time of stringency for public budgets, government will make new and expensive commitments to child care. Indeed, at this moment major initiatives are pending in Congress. In addition, different states – functioning, in this instance, as the social laboratories that Justice Brandeis championed – are operating child care programs that vary significantly in nature and approach. It therefore seems appropriate to view the choices among alternative programmatic structures for improving the system of child care as a case study in the attempt to predict the consequences of particular varieties of government intervention. What can we say about how the form of a new child care program will influence social ideas and arrangements in the future?

American legal scholars have devoted surprisingly little effort to studying India. In India, as in America, judges, lawyers, and legislators have had to shape a transplanted legal system with English roots. Both countries have adapted English legal institutions to conditions far more heterogeneous – ethnically, racially, linguistically,and geographically – than those of the mother country. It thus seems no accident that India's constitutional structure parallels that of the United States in so many ways. For example, India has a written constitution that embodies principles of federalism and separation of powers, and that provides for judicially enforced guarantees of individual rights. Indeed, nowhere else in the world does the judiciary play so central a political role as it does in the United States and India.

Federal aid to the disabled is a vast enterprise; over nine billion dollars are annually paid to five million beneficiaries. In this Article, Professor Liebman points out how the ad hoc nature of social welfare legislation and programming has resulted in a system that produces inconsistent and sometimes inequitable determinations of disability. The present system, he argues, draws significant economic and social distinctions among the disabled, as well as distinctions between the disabled and the unemployed, that have been inadequately explained and justified. By focusing on worker expectations generated by the administration of our disability programs, and on the structural relationships established between the different programs, Professor Liebman suggests a set of principles to guide future legislative developments and judicial decisions.

The United States does not have a system for compensating the victims of illness and injury; it has a set of different institutions that provide compensation. We rely on both tort law and giant programs of public and private insurance to compensate the victims of illness and injury. These institutions perform related functions, but the relationships among them are far from coherent. Indeed, the institutions sometimes work at cross-purposes, compensating some victims excessively and others not at all. The absence of a coherent system of compensation is reflected even in suggested reforms of existing institutions. Proposals to reform tort law often do not recognize the role played by public and private insurance programs in compensating for health care expenses and lost income, even though insurance programs dwarf tort law as a system of reimbursement. Similarly, those who offer proposals for altered private or public insurance protection – and many put changes in the nation's system of health insurance at the top of the domestic agenda – usually ignore the connections between a family's insurance protection (whether provided by government, by an employer, or by first-party purchase) and the ill or injured victim's claims against a tortfeasor. Moreover, insurance reform proposals often ignore a fundamental insight of modern tort theory: when a system provides compensation for expenses not previously reimbursed, the entire cost of this new compensation is not an added social cost. The added cost of a new program may, in the broader social context, merely be shifted from victims or another program. The blindnesses of these proposals to their institutional "neighbors" are easy to explain. Because of academic and practice specialization, many of the persons most knowledgeable and creative about tort law know little about private and social insurance, while insurance and social-welfare experts often know little about tort law.