Clinical Associate Professor Beth Cate practiced law in the public and private sectors for 20 years. Her expertise includes intellectual property law, data privacy and security, administrative law, compliance and ethics, and constitutional law.
She taught law and policy classes at IU on an adjunct basis for 13 years before joining the faculty full time in 2011. 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 undergraduate courses on data law and policy and religion in public life. She serves as the lead instructor for O'Neill’s core undergraduate law course and the faculty coordinator for an undergraduate major in Law and Public Policy.
With Fred H. Cate, she co-authored “The Supreme Court and Information Privacy” for 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. She has authored two entries in Springer’s 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.
Reflecting her continued interest in data and intellectual property issues affecting research and education, 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. In June 2020, she will serve as an instructor at an NEH-funded institute for researchers and librarians hosted by University of California-Berkeley on “Building Legal Literacies for Text Data Mining.”
