Deirdre K. Mulligan is a professor of law at the UC Berkeley School of Information and a Faculty Director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology. She was the founding director of the Samuelson Clinic, which she led from 2001-2008. Before coming to Berkeley, she was staff counsel at the Center for Democracy & Technology in Washington.
Professor Mulligan’s current research agenda focuses on information privacy and security. Current projects include qualitative interviews to understand the institutionalization and management of privacy within corporate America, and role of law in corporate information security policy and practice. Other areas of current research include digital rights management technology and privacy and security issues in sensor networks and visual surveillance systems, and alternative legal strategies to advance network security.
Recent publications include: “Privacy Decision Making in Administrative Agencies”, Kenneth Bamberger and Deirdre K. Mulligan, 75 U. CHI. L. REV. 75 (2008; “The Magnificence of the Disaster: Reconstructing the Sony BMG Rootkit Incident”, Deirdre K. Mulligan & Aaron K. Perzanowski, Berkeley Technology Law Journal, Vol. 22, p. 1157, (2007); . “Embedded RFID and Everyday Things: A Case Study of the Security and Privacy Risks of the U.S. e-Passport”, Marci Meingast, Jennifer King and Deirdre K. Mulligan, IEEE International Conference on RFID, March, 2007; “Transactional Confidentiality in Sensor Networks,” Sameer Pai, Marci Meingast, Tanya Roosta, Sergio Bermudez, Stephen B. Wicker, Deirdre K. Mulligan, Shankar Sastry, IEEE Security and Privacy, vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 28-35, Jul/Aug, 2008; “Noticing Notice: A large-scale experiment on the timing of software license agreements”, Nathan Good, Jens Grossklags, Deirdre K. Mulligan and Joe Konstan, In: Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’07), San Jose, CA, April 28 – May 3, 2007, pp. 607-616.
Mulligan is currently participating in a multi-stakeholder initiative, the Global Network Initiative, to advance and preserve freedom of expression and privacy through collaborative efforts aimed to resist government efforts that seek to enlist companies in acts of censorship and surveillance in violation of international human rights standards.
During the summer of 2007 Mulligan was a member of an expert team charged by the California Secretary of State to conduct a top-to-bottom review of the voting systems certified for use in California elections. This review investigated the security, accuracy, reliability and accessibility of electronic voting systems used in California.
Mulligan was a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Authentication Technology and Its Privacy Implications; the Federal Trade Commission’s Federal Advisory Committee on Online Access and Security, and the National Task Force on Privacy, Technology, and Criminal Justice Information. She was a vice-chair of the California Bipartisan Commission on Internet Political Practices and chaired the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy (CFP) Conference in 2004. She is currently a member of the California Office of Privacy Protection’s Advisory Council and a co-chair of Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Academic Advisory Board. She serves on the board of the California Voter Foundation and on the advisory board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Education
B.A., Smith College (1988)
J.D., Georgetown University (1994)
Deirdre Kathleen Mulligan is not teaching any Law courses in Spring 2024.