Working as a legal reporter for more years than I care to admit, some of the people I have interviewed tend to stick in my mind.

On a Sunday night in 2020, when I heard the horrible news about the gunman who went to U.S. District Judge Esther Salas’ home and killed her college student son, I had a flashback to a phone conversation I had with Salas 10 years earlier, when she was confirmed to the federal bench. She seemed earnest and serious. When the talk turned to family—her husband, attorney Mark Anderl, and their son, Daniel—I could hear great warmth and affection in her voice.

So when I heard that a gunman invaded the judge’s home, I knew Salas must have been heartbroken. She demonstrated tremendous courage when she returned to the bench and became an advocate for judicial safety.

Acting on the news that the assailant found Salas’ address online, New Jersey lawmakers soon approved a measure called Daniel’s Law, which provides a private right of action in the case of online disclosure of personal information for judges—or police officers or prosecutors, among others. Later, in 2023, the legislature adopted amendments to the law, allowing persons protected under the law to assign their claims to others and requiring judges to award liquidated damages of $1,000 for each violation. And earlier this year, Atlas Data Privacy Corp. flooded New Jersey courts with suits—around 140, by latest count, naming RE/MAX, Zillow, Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis Risk Data Management as defendants.

One detail about the suits: an attorney representing Atlas Data in the litigation, Rajiv Parikh of PEM Law in West Orange, New Jersey, previously worked as a lobbyist for the company, encouraging lawmakers to adopt the 2023 amendments, according to court filings from the defendants.

Parikh did not respond to a phone call or an email seeking comment for this article.

The company previously said that Parikh’s lobbying work for Atlas amounted to only “a few brief discussions regarding government process and procedures." The company also pointed out that the individual claimants who assigned their claims to Atlas will get a share of the litigation proceeds.

The huge volume of Daniel’s Law litigation took me by surprise. And the immense tragedy of Daniel Anderl’s death, especially when considered alongside the dual roles of Parikh as a lobbyist working on the legislation and a litigator who stands to reap a windfall from the application of the statute, made me uneasy. Plenty of laws are enforced through private lawsuits, but the safety of judges is so important; I wonder if delegating that responsibility to the plaintiffs bar is the right way to go.

Ellen Goodman, a professor at Rutgers Law School who focuses on privacy, said the approach to judicial security used in New Jersey’s Daniel’s Law, as a means to aggregate claims, “would have a lot of support in the privacy community, because it kind of addresses what a lot of privacy scholars write about, which is that privacy should not be viewed as kind of an individual right.”

“It has to be much more of a societal interest,” she said. “And, in some ways, this is moving in that direction.”

Goodman added that, in her view, the law’s approach may not be the best way to protect judges. “Maybe it would be better if the law were rewritten and a portion of the haul would go into public safety—more protection,” she said.

Laura Clark Fey, an attorney in Leawood, Kansas, who specializes in privacy law and is the chair of the Data Privacy and Protection Working Group at the Defense Research Institute’s Center for Law and Public Policy, contends that New Jersey’s Daniel’s Law, as modified, is ”a dangerous law.” In particular, she points to the law’s provisions allowing the assignment of claims and making the fine of $1,000 per occurrence mandatory instead of discretionary.

“You look at those two key elements of the 2023 amendments and it just screams ‘the only people this benefits are the plaintiffs lawyers,’” she said.

In addition, Fey said New Jersey’s Daniel’s Law uses a very broad definition of what it means to disclose protected parties’ data. New Jersey’s law, she said, “reminds me in a lot of ways of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, which some refer to as total cash for plaintiffs attorneys.”

Laws enacted on the federal level and in Maryland to safeguard judges’ home addresses haven’t prompted any litigation, in part, because they don’t allow assignment of claims, Fey said.

“When you look at this law, does it really advance the ball in a way that’s going to protect these people that are covered by the law, or does it simply line the pockets of people like Rajiv Parikh? It’s just a weird law, but it’s a law that companies have got to take very seriously,” Fey said.

Politico reported that if each of the 19,000 claimants in the New Jersey litigation prove just one violation, the defendants would be on the hook for $19 million.

Lawyers for some of the defendants in the New Jersey Daniel’s Law litigation have moved to dismiss the complaint, claiming the statute violates their free speech rights.

Daniel's Law imposes content-based restrictions on protected speech, making it subject to strict scrutiny, according to the motion to dismiss, which was prepared by lawyers at Latham & Watkins. But Daniel’s Law cannot survive strict scrutiny because it is not narrowly tailored to the state interest it is supposed to serve, the defendants said. And even if it is analyzed under an intermediate-scrutiny standard, Daniel's Law would allegedly fail because it is not reasonably tailored to the state's interest, according to the motion to dismiss.

Many states enacted their own versions of Daniel’s Law after the killing of Daniel Anderl. And recently, a West Virginia federal court has seen litigation claiming violations of that state’s version of the law.

West Virginia’s version of the law doesn’t allow assignment of claims, so the five cases filed there are brought as class actions. LexisNexis Risk Solutions and Thomson Reuters are among the targets in West Virginia, where the suits were filed by Bursor & Fisher.

Oklahoma, Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, Illinois, Missouri, Arizona and Colorado have also adopted versions of Daniel’s Law, said Angelo Stio III of Troutman Pepper Hamilton Sanders in Princeton, New Jersey. But only New Jersey allows the assignment of claims, Stio said. And only New Jersey and West Virginia have liquidated damages provisions, he said. Stio says he’s unaware of any Daniel’s Law litigation in states other than New Jersey and West Virginia.

Privacy litigation appears to be growing rapidly, and threats to the safety of judges appear to be experiencing an uptick as well. But will other courts be deluged with judicial security suits? Stio says it’s unlikely that other places will see as many suits as New Jersey.

Going forward, Stio says states seeking to protect judges and other public officials will be faced with a choice between a Daniel’s Law-type measure or a more comprehensive privacy statute like the ones adopted in the European Union and California.

“We won’t see that in other states, the volume that is out there [in New Jersey]. I think that you may see criminal prosecutions. You may see regulatory enforcement. But the way that New Jersey statute is—the assignment and liquidated damages, the lack of any verification mechanism to even confirm someone is a covered person—are, I think, problematic,” he said. “I think that it will need to be fixed. And I do think that as you see courts interpreting these laws, it will be corrected.”