In my memory of law school, no issues were as provocative as privacy and freedom.

When I was in law school, there was no shortage of debate—about almost anything. Law school is a curious magnet that attracts both the contentious and the pragmatic—though in what proportion I cannot be bothered to figure out.

Some topics were less susceptible than others. Interestingly, Tax Law and Administrative Law were among the more docile of the courses in my recollection. Perhaps not surprisingly, Constitutional Law and Criminal Law seemed to inspire the most debate.

Privacy and freedom, regardless of context, struck—they strike—at our core in a unique way. They are both abstracted Constitutional principles that flow through our understanding not only of specific laws specifically geared but at our understanding of law’s end and, importantly, who we are.

Looking back, the debate was quaint to the extent it was largely unsullied by technology. It isn’t that there was no technology and we weren’t thinking about the future. I wasn’t a student of Christopher Langdell, after all. Rather, it was that the technological intrusions we considered lacked the sheer scope and sophistication and virtuality (surreality) that is now commonplace.

Our collective imagination was largely actual, physical—that is, not yet attuned to the virtual. It was an Aristotelean world in ways that may no longer obtain.

There was no Google—at least as it exists now. It was a research project. No Facebook. No Twitter. And, importantly, this was pre-9/11. Intrusions into one’s privacy were literal, physical, geographical. And those intrusions into one’s privacy required one to balance expectations of privacy and freedom from government intrusion against the ideals governance and its realities.

The world has changed. And, the law has lagged, as it will do.

Enter Constitution 3.0: Freedom and Technological Change, edited by Jeffrey Rosen, George Washington University Law School Professor of Constitutional Law and Brookings Institution non-resident Senior Fellow, and Benjamin Wittes, Brookings Institution Senior Fellow in Governance Studies and co-founder of the excellent national security blog, Lawfare. A project of the Brookings Institution’s Future of the Constitution Program, the book—Constitution 3.0—and related event held on 13 December 2011 at the Brookings Institution asks a diverse group of scholars to ponder technological developments around 2025 and their effect on current Constitutional thinking.

The challenge—and reward—in this comes not so much from the sense that there are set answers to any of the questions raised. Rather, it is the level of difficulty and imagining that are pleasing.

Introducing today’s event, Professor Rosen cited three supposedly hypothetical situations that intrigue him most and represent the kinds of challenges the editors and authors faced: The so-called “Open Planet” example, in which social networks link and broadcast live video feeds from around the world; the power of genetic engineering to combine the DNA of two men to fertilize an ovum, allowing for the creation of a child bearing the genetic imprint of both men; and the use of fMRI technology in criminal law trials as a means to establish the capacity and potential punishment of the accused (and convicted). I say ‘supposedly hypothetical’ because, as Professor Rosen points out, these are present realities. The challenge here is not so much technological as legal—and social, political. How do we think about these abilities? What do they imply? And, how can and should law frame them?

Listening to the conversation this morning, a seemingly overwhelming number of difficult questions arise about the relation of freedom, technological development and law. Perhaps the most interesting over-arching question—the one the book seeks to address from a dizzying array of angles—is what I would call an anthropological one:

Does technology’s dizzying development, the sheer volume of information it exposes and tracks through, for, about and sometimes without us pose to our democracy categorically new problems requiring categorically new answers? Or, are these questions we have, in some way, always faced and Constitutional institutions, while challenged anew, are as well suited to answer these questions as they were at our founding?

To some extent, this question presents a false dichotomy.

There are new problems. These aren’t only adjustments of legal norms to fit new variations of fact patterns. For example, as Professor O.C. Snead, of Notre Dame Law School pointed, the use in criminal sentencing of cognitive neuroscientific research into the extent (and even existence) of freewill has the power not only to change legal process but our entire moral landscape. As Professor Tim Wu of Columbia University Law School pointed out, it is not altogether clear that the Constitution is equipped to deal with a challenge like a technologically enhanced—and morally diminished—human. And, as Mr. Wittes and Professor Wu argued, there may be real anxiety over the seeming newness of these issues and the unbalanced contexts (diffusing governing power for Mr. Wittes; agglomerated private commercial power for Professor Wu) in which they occur that, when (if) resolved, may reveal some familiar clarity.

As Professor Rosen (one doubts unwittingly) demonstrated by ending the discussion with reference to Justice Louis Brandeis, Professor Rosen’s Supreme Court hero and in important ways the prescient framer of our jurisprudential approach to these issues, for all the power and prominence of technological development, for all the difficult questions, for all the dread at the prospect of our political process legislating the best solutions, the Constitution, in the hands of a towering intellect imbued with historic insight and foresight, just might do the trick.