David Levine joins editorial board of Secrecy and Society

The new international, interdisciplinary journal "explores secrecy as the intentional or nonintentional concealment of information at the intersections of theory, definition, language, praxis, and culture."

Associate Professor David S. Levine is one of 18 leading scholars from around the world – and the only law professor – serving on the founding editorial board of a new online journal dedicated to the nascent scholarly field of secrecy.

Levine will help shape research agendas and policymaking through his involvement with Secrecy and Society. The peer-reviewed open-access journal analyzes and evaluates dimensions of secrecy in society while also reporting on “affiliations with censorship, confidentiality, privacy, surveillance, and forms of secrecy in the human-built and natural worlds.”

In the inaugural issue published this fall, Levine joined with Lisa Lynch of Drew University on “Whither Megaleaking? Questions in the Wake of the Panama Papers.” 

“Secrecy, which includes the intentional and nonintentional concealment of information, is a new scholarly field,” Levine said. “While related concepts like privacy and transparency have existing communities, secrecy as a concept is surprisingly understudied despite a pressing need to understand its contours.” 

In addition to his work at Elon Law, Levine is an Affiliate Scholar at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School. He is a 2016-2017 Visiting Research Collaborator at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy and is founder and host of Culture on KZSU-FM at Stanford University), an information policy, intellectual property law and technology talk show for which he has recorded over 250 interviews since May 2006.

Levine’s scholarship focuses on the operation of intellectual property law at the intersection of technology and public life, specifically information flows in the lawmaking and regulatory process and intellectual property law’s impact on public and private secrecy, transparency and accountability.