java.util.Date clone or copy to not expose internal reference

Question

It is best practice not to expose the internal references of an Object (Entity). So if an Object has a field of type java.util.Date then for example the get

Answer 1

If it's definitely just a Date, it won't make any difference either way.

If the actual object might be a subclass of Date (such as java.sql.Date) then I'd hope that clone() would preserve the extra information (including which class it is) whereas calling the constructor wouldn't.

As an aside, if you used Joda Time you wouldn't have this problem, as there are plenty of immutable types to use. It's also a much better API :)