Privacy and Conformity: Rethinking “The Right Most Valued by Civilized Men” (original) (raw)
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"Privacy & Conformity: Rethinking 'the right most valued by civilized men'."
"Privacy & Conformity: Rethinking 'the right most valued by civilized men,'" (Touro Law Review, forthcoming January 2017). This invited contribution places Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren's famous article, "The Right to Privacy," into the historical context of the nineteenth-century cult of domesticity in order to explore how the patriarchal and misogynist assumptions built into the essay contributed to the idealization of the home as the epicenter of individual freedom in American legal thought.
Maryland Law Review, 2015
The intensity and complexity of life, attendant upon advancing civilization, have rendered necessary some retreat from the world, and man, under the refining influence of culture, has become more sensitive to publicity, so that solitude and privacy have become more essential to the individual; but modern enterprise and invention have, through invasions upon his privacy, subjected him to mental pain and distress, far greater than could be inflicted by mere bodily injury. 1 Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. 2 Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren published The Right to Privacy in the Harvard Law Review in 1890 because they were concerned that the modern era provided inadequate safeguards for protection of the private realm and the "right to one's personality." 3 With the emerging recognition of a "man's spiritual nature," feelings, and intellect, came the acknowledgement of "the right to enjoy life-the right to be let alone." 4 Brandeis and Warren argued that if thoughts, emotions, and sensations demanded legal protection, that the common law was beautifully capable of
Georgetown Journal of International Law, 2013
Conventional wisdom paints U.S. and European approaches to privacy at irreconcilable odds. But that portrayal overlooks a more nuanced reality of privacy in American law. The free speech imperative of U.S. constitutional law since the civil rights movement shows signs of tarnish. And in areas of law that have escaped constitutionalization, such as fair-use copyright and the freedom of information, developing personality norms resemble European-style balancing. Recent academic and political initiatives on privacy in the United States emphasize subject control and contextual analysis, reflecting popular thinking that is not so different after all from that which animates Europe's 1995 directive and 2012 proposed regulation. For all the handwringing in the United States over encroachment by anti-libertarian EU regulation, a new American privacy is already on the rise.
Protecting the Genetic Self from Biometric Threats
This chapter examines not only the history of the term privacy but also its international recognition as a fully protected right. Given the wide array of definitions of privacy, it can be said that the term seeks its identity. Depending on time and space, this right has had various traits, beyond the obstacles of a strict definition. The aspects or features of the term are those that lead to the necessity of its international recognition and protection, especially in the present digital and technological environment, where its foundation is reconsidered and internationally protected in an effective way.
Privacy, Speech, and Values: What We Have No Business Knowing
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2015
In the United States the ascendancy of speech protection is due to an expansive and unjustified view of the value or primacy of free expression and access to information. This is perhaps understandable, given that privacy has been understood as a mere interest, whereas speech rights have been seen as more fundamental. I have argued elsewhere that the ''mere interest'' view of privacy is false. Privacy, properly defined, is a necessary condition for human well-being or flourishing. The opening section of this article will provide an overview of this theory. Next, after a few remarks on speech absolutism, privacy absolutism, and balancing theories, I will sketch several of the dominant argument strands that have been offered in support of presumptively weighty speech rights. While these arguments, taken together, establish that free speech is important, they do not support the view that speech should nearly always trump privacy. In final section I will present and defend a way to balance free speech and privacy claims.