Beth Cate

Education

• J.D., (Cum Laude), Harvard Law School, 1991
• B.A., (Summa Cum Laude), Economics, George Washington University, 1988

Courses

• Capstone Course
• Honors Law and Public Affairs
• Law and Public Affairs
• Law, Public Management and Public Policy

Biography

Clinical Associate Professor Beth Cate’s expertise includes intellectual property law, data privacy and security, research regulation, and constitutional law. A practicing lawyer for 21 years, she provided 12 years of counsel to Indiana University, focusing mainly on legal and policy issues surrounding intellectual property, data, and information technologies.

She taught law and policy classes at IU on an adjunct basis for 13 years before joining the faculty full time in 2012. She currently teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on the intersection of law and public affairs, including a graduate seminar on strategic litigation to advance public policy interests and an undergraduate course on religion in public life. She serves as the lead instructor for SPEA’s core undergraduate law course and the faculty coordinator for an undergraduate major in Law and Public Policy.

She recently authored two entries in Springer’s new Global Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Public Policy, and Governance, entitled “Constitutional Rights of Public Employees” and “Constitutional Intersection of Civil Liberty and Public Administration.” She also co-authored, with Andrea Need, “Correcting the System of Unequal Justice,” in Tavis Smiley’s 2016 book Covenant With Black America—Ten Years Later.

With Fred H. Cate, she has co-authored “The Supreme Court and Information Privacy,” for the forthcoming Bulk Surveillance: Systematic Government Access to Private Sector Data, James X. Dempsey and Fred H. Cate eds. (Oxford Univ. Press 2018). An earlier version of the chapter appeared as an article in the journal International Data Privacy Law. They are currently working on a book about the Supreme Court’s privacy jurisprudence, and Prof. Beth Cate is also working on an article addressing the future of student records privacy.

Reflecting her continued interest in intellectual property rules particularly as they affect higher education and public access to information, in 2017 Cate presented on copyright law at an international intellectual property law workshop co-hosted by Oxford University and Indiana University, and at the annual conference of the National Association of College and University Attorneys.