Who controls how one’s identity is used by others? This legal question, centuries old, demands greater scrutiny in the Internet age. Jennifer Rothman uses the right of publicity—a little-known law, often wielded by celebrities—to answer that question, not just for the famous but for everyone. In challenging the conventional story of the right of publicity’s emergence, development, and justifications, Rothman shows how it transformed people into intellectual property, leading to a bizarre world in which you can lose ownership of your own identity. This shift and the right’s subsequent expansion undermine individual liberty and privacy, restrict free speech, and suppress artistic works. The Right of Publicity traces the right’s origins back to the emergence of the right of privacy in the late 1800s. The central impetus for the adoption of privacy laws was to protect people from “wrongful publicity.” This privacy-based protection was not limited to anonymous private citizens but applied to famous actors, athletes, and politicians. Beginning in the 1950s, the right transformed into a fully transferable intellectual property right, generating a host of legal disputes, from control of dead celebrities like Prince, to the use of student athletes’ images by the NCAA, to lawsuits by users of Facebook and victims of revenge porn. The right of publicity has lost its way. Rothman proposes returning the right to its origins and in the process reclaiming privacy for a public world.

The Willowbrook Wars is a dramatic and illuminating account of the effort to close down a scandal-ridden institution and return its 5,400 handicapped residents to communities in New York. The wars began in 1972 with Geraldo Rivera's televised raid on the Willowbrook State School. They continued for three years in a federal courtroom, with civil libertarian lawyers persuading a conservative and conscience-stricken judge to expand the rights of the disabled, and they culminated in a 1975 consent decree, with the state of New York pledging to accomplish the unprecedented assignment in six years. From 1975 to 1982, David and Sheila Rothman observed this remarkable chapter in American reform of mental disabilities care. Would the state live up to its agreement without "dumping" residents into other nightmarish institutions? Would the lawyers prove as interested in meeting client needs as in securing client rights? Could a tradition-bound bureaucracy create a new network of community services? And finally, would a governor and a legislature tolerate such outside intervention, and if so, for how long? In answering these questions, The Willowbrook Wars takes us behind the scenes to clarify the role of the judiciary, the fate of the underprivileged, and the potential for social justice. In their new afterword, the authors bring the story up to date, describing the results of the closing of the institution in 1987 from the experiences of integrating the former residents into communities to the legal battles between the state of New York and advocates for the mentally handicapped.