This thesis explores the factors that influence the US Supreme Court’s decisions to overturn precedent. I argue that the Court is more likely to depart from precedent in cases relating to the right to privacy due to the dynamic nature of privacy rights and their inherent connection to rapidly evolving technology and societal values. As society grapples with digital surveillance, data collection, and personal freedoms, the question of how the Supreme Court navigates past precedents in the face of new realities becomes increasingly relevant. I find that privacy precedents are more likely to be altered than other subject matter. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of the common law system’s adaptability in the face of contemporary challenges by examining the Court’s decisions to overturn precedents based on subject matter.

The Distance-based Content Routing (DCR) protocol is introduced, which enables routers to maintain multiple loop-free routes to the nearest instances of a named data object or

name prex in an information centric network (ICN), and

establish content delivery trees over which all or some instances of the same named data object or name prex can be

contacted. In contrast to all prior routing solutions for ICNs,

DCR operates without requiring routers to establish overlays, knowing the network topology, using complete paths

to content replicas, or knowing about all the sites storing

replicas of named content. It is shown that DCR is correct

and that is orders of magnitude more scalable than recent

name-based routing approaches for ICNs, in terms of the

time and signaling overhead needed to obtain correct routing to named content.