Nina-Simone Edwards Publishes Essay on Black Homeplace and Privacy Law Edwards examines how traditional understandings of privacy law fail to account for the significance and complexity of Black domestic spaces.

By Law Communications
September 30, 2026

Nina-Simone Edwards, a technology and research librarian at Washington and Lee University School of Law, has published “Inside, Outside, and In Between: Black Homeplace as a Blueprint for Privacy Law” in volume 35 of the Southern California Review of Law and Social Justice.

In the essay, Edwards reexamines the meaning of home and privacy for Black Americans, using no-knock warrants as a central case study. She argues that the traditional Fourth Amendment distinction between spaces inside and outside the home fails to account for the layered ways privacy operates within domestic spaces and can leave Black homes particularly vulnerable to state intrusion.

“By tracing the English common law maxim ‘[e]very man’s house is his castle,’ this essay examines the particular significance of the Black homeplace and critiques legal standards that fail to account for the layered zones of privacy within a home. Through storytelling and visual mapping, the essay proposes a new framework for conceptualizing domestic privacy–one that recognizes the multiplicity of intimate, familial, memorial, and threshold spaces within the homeplace and understands how state power collapses them. This reconceptualization offers a path toward a jurisprudence that centers Black life, insisting that the homeplace is not merely a physical structure but a sanctuary deserving of meaningful legal protection,” writes Edwards.

Nina-Simone Edwards supports the integration of emerging technologies into the law school’s research, information access, and teaching missions, as well as teaching legal research. Her scholarship examines privacy, technology governance, and information justice, with particular attention to how race, vulnerability, and digital access shape experiences of surveillance and cybersecurity harms. She recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Georgetown Law’s Institute for Technology Law & Policy, where she worked on the Redesigning the Governance Stack Project, and earned a Master of Science in Library and Information Science from The Catholic University of America. She received her J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center.

The essay is available through the W&L Law scholarly repository.

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