The dossier was never intended to be made public (though, the professor points out, since the law protects only material collected to assess a job applicant, it could have been) and Justice Scalia was never supposed to know about the assignment, much the way many of us are blithely unaware about what can be discovered about ourselves online.

Professor Reidenberg’s comments at the conference were picked up by a Web site, Above the Law, and the genie was out of the bottle, speeded on its way with the headline “What Fordham Knows About Justice Scalia.”

Another teaching moment. Mr. Reidenberg was speaking about the loss of “practical obscurity,” that is, the idea that certain personal information may always have been publicly available  down at the courthouse, say  but in reality was very hard to discover and disseminate.

“I was giving an academic paper in an academic conference, speaking about the loss of practical obscurity, and the example I use is plucked out of context and becomes a national story,” he said.

When word leaked about the dossier, Mr. Reidenberg offered to show Justice Scalia what the class had collected, but he did not respond.

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Privacy, and its breach, have been issues for millennia  Justice Scalia made his remarks about Internet privacy at a conference organized by the Institute of American and Talmudic Law titled “The Right to Privacy and Individual Liberties From Ancient Times to the Cyberspace Age.” But technology is placing new stress on our laws, and the solutions are not always easy ones.