Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Right to Privacy
    The Right to Privacy
    The Right to Privacy
    Ebook91 pages1 hour

    The Right to Privacy

    By Steven Alan Childress (ed.), Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis

    5/5

    ()

    Switch to audiobook
    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Modern presentation of a classic work of legal thought, one of the most influential law works of all time, and important U.S. history. Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis created the notion of legal protection for a special interest in privacy with their 1890 article. Later Brandeis became a legend on the Supreme Court. Edited and introduced by law professor Steven Alan Childress, with telling backstory.

    Warren and Brandeis's famous and impactful "The Right to Privacy" is presented in a modern ebook edition, featuring a new Foreword by Steven Alan Childress, J.D., Ph.D., a senior law professor at Tulane University. Includes photos and rare news clippings. Part of the Legal Legends Series by Quid Pro Books, in its 125th Anniversary Edition.

    The most influential piece of legal scholarship, many scholars say, is this 1890 Harvard Law Review article by two Boston lawyers (one of whom later became a legendary Supreme Court Justice). Warren and Brandeis created -- by cleverly weaving strands of precedent, policy, and logic -- the legal concept of privacy and the power of legal protection for that right. Their clear and effective prose stands the test of time, and influenced such modern notions as "inviolate personality" and law's "elasticity." They saw the threat of new technology. Most of all, they asserted the fundamental "right to be let alone," and its implications to modern law are profound. Their privacy concept has grown over the decades, now raising issues about abortion, drug testing, surveillance, sexual orientation, free speech, the "right to die," and medical confidentiality. All these spin-offs trace their origins to this master work. It is simply one of the most significant parts of the modern canon of law, politics, and sociology.

    The extensive new Foreword by Professor Childress shares not only this import and effect, but also the fascinating back story behind the article. Its origins are found in Warren's own prickly experiences with the press and the paparazzi of the day -- famously, after their reports about, and intrusive photographs of, his family weddings. There is simply no edition like this one: modern, explained, illustrated, and well-presented. The original pagination of the article is retained in inserts, to maintain continuity with and referencing of the original.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherQuid Pro, LLC
    Release dateDec 25, 2010
    ISBN9781458055323
    Author

    Steven Alan Childress (ed.)

    Professor of Law at Tulane University, coauthor of the three-volume treatise Federal Standards of Review, and series editor for the Legal Legends Series at Quid Pro Books.

    Related to The Right to Privacy

    Related ebooks

    Americas (North, Central, South, West Indies) History For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      No Legalization of Sharia Law

      Jul 28, 2017

      Q: Did a Muslim federal judge rule two parts of sharia law legal? A: No. That only happened in a fake story on a satirical website. FULL ANSWER Sharia is […] The post No Legalization of Sharia Law appeared first on FactCheck.org.

      2 min read

    • Article

      The Parties Understand and Agree That by Entering Into This Agreement They Are Each Relinquishing and Waiving Their Right Under Applicable Law to Have Any Claim Decided in a Court of Law Before a Judge and/or Jury.

      Nov 27, 2017

      I. SISTER IRENE MORISSETTE ALWAYS LOCKED HER DOOR AT night. Maybe it was force of habit from her decades teaching at an isolated missionary school in Africa, or maybe it was, as she told a police detective later, just that she didn’t want “anyone co

      11 min read

    • Article

      Reimagining Legal Education

      Jun 27, 2019

      Reimagining Legal Education
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Recidivism Trap

      Mar 15, 2018

      Any discussion of criminal justice policy inevitably includes the word “recidivism.” Usually more than once. Recidivism is the reoccurrence of crime among people known to have committed crimes before. At all levels of justice, from local probation of

      2 min read

    • Article

      The Global Data War Heats Up

      Jun 26, 2019

      The Global Data War Heats Up
      5 min read

    • Article

      How to Think About Walmart

      Apr 11, 2017

      How to Think About Walmart
      3 min read

    • Article

      Supreme Court Lets Stand Ruling That Protects Homeless Who Sleep On Sidewalk

      Dec 16, 2019

      WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court refused Monday to hear a major case on homeless, letting stand a ruling that protects their right to sleep on the sidewalk or in public parks if no other shelter is available. The justices without comment or a dissent s

      3 min read

    • Article

      Busting Trust Myths

      Sep 3, 2020

      “Trust busting” is the term often used to describe instances where a court finds in favour of a claimant trying to access trust assets. Here, though, I do not want to talk about “trust busting”. Instead I want to bust some trust myths. There has been

      2 min read

    • Article

      A MAGA Judiciary

      Dec 5, 2023

      A MAGA Judiciary
      7 min read

    • Article

      Originalism, Divided

      May 25, 2021

      Originalism, Divided
      9 min read

    • Article

      Cal Thomas: A Prophecy Come True

      Oct 11, 2022

      In 2015, when a Supreme Court majority ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges that “state bans on same-sex marriage and on recognizing same-sex marriages duly performed in other jurisdictions are unconstitutional under the Due Process and Equal Protection cla

      2 min read

    • Article

      The Price of Privacy

      Apr 6, 2022

      The Price of Privacy
      10 min read

    • Article

      Originalism Moves From Theory To High Court. What That Means For US.

      Dec 21, 2021

      In June 1986, at an otherwise nondescript Attorney General’s Conference on Economic Liberties, Antonin Scalia made an iconic sales pitch. Originalism – a judicial theory holding that the Constitution should be interpreted in line with the framers’ th

      7 min read

    • Article

      The New Puritans

      Aug 31, 2021

      The New Puritans
      28 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Right to Privacy

    5/5

    1 rating0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Right to Privacy - Steven Alan Childress (ed.)

      FOREWORD

      When Boston law partners Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis penned the 1890 article The Right to Privacy, they changed the world.  Seldom is that feat accomplished by stuffy works of legal academe published in the tony journals of U.S. law schools, even the Harvard Law Review.  Most law review articles are hardly read, much less effective and influential. But this one was not stuffy – it was elegant and painstaking, clever and readable.  And it hooked into an emotional sense of privacy that resonated with readers and lawmakers for decades, and still hits home today.

      This article was more than just influential.  It has become, starting out of the gates and throughout more than a century of legal change, one of the most cited law review articles in history – and very likely the most important, game-changing piece of legal scholarship ever.  It invented a whole field of law.  Later its spillover repercussions, some unwittingly perhaps, were felt in more current debates over informational privacy, abortion, contraception, the right to die, government surveillance, medical disclosures, drug testing, and sexual orientation.  Beyond tort law, as simply put by Judge Richard Posner in a 1995 opinion, the legal concept of privacy . . . originated in a famous article by Warren and Brandeis.¹ [A few notes follow this Foreword, and are linked to jump to easily, while those in the body of the article re-start at 1, also linked, to preserve numeration.] When you see pro-life activists picketing clinics and the U.S. Supreme Court, you can trace their outrage back to the recognition that privacy matters and is a legal right.

      Warren and Brandeis undoubtedly did not intend all these currents downstream from the ripple they instigated, and some of the argument’s logical implications have proved troublesome in light of the First Amendment free-speech positions that Brandeis famously took when he became a [great] Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.  Nevertheless, the power they unleashed went beyond the common law argument they fashioned.

      The article and its affirmative sense that the law must protect individuals in their multiple spheres of private life remain poignant in modern times and in a variety of legal contexts.  It has even influenced the constitutional law applied in U.S. courts today, although the article was never about constitutional limits on privacy as such.   Yet even in its more modest realm of the common law (well, modest on hindsight, as it may have been quite radical at the time), in recognizing within the law of states a civil and non-contractual right of protection against invasions of privacy, the article was nothing short of momentous.

      It is also a good read, for lawyer and nonlawyer alike.  These two knew how to write, and they picked a subject people care deeply about.  There is every historical evidence that they cared deeply about it, too, in ways they do not let on in the article itself.  They had something of an agenda at work here,  and the back story is interesting.  But even standing on its own – and not simply as a polemical reflex from a Warren personally touched by a nosey press, or a young Brandeis’s opening salvo in what would become a rock star life in the law – it is a fascinating read that stands the test of time.  Plus it foreshadowed big chunks of that time.

      Even pop culture may owe some debt to this article.  It has to be the most important byproduct in human history of a possible paparazzi incident (more on this later), and could have taught Sean Penn a lesson or two.  Moreover, we may not have a cult of personality today, or talk so openly about individuality and privacy beyond law, had these two men not put their finger on, and articulated, the concept of an inviolate personality.  Their evocative prose touches on many themes in law and culture, and even seems inadvertently to use emoticons.  That’s a stretch, to be sure, but they did allude to the theft of that personality as piracy and denied this was about judicial legislation (because of the law’s elasticity) in a way that some would recognize as not only modern, but postmodern.

      Another very modern theme of this article is its emphasis on emerging technology as a threat to personal privacy as well as a reason, in turn, to develop the law:  indeed, they say (at note 40) that law’s greatest boast is its adaptability to new conditions, the capacity for growth, which reacts to an ever changing society to meet its needs.   Their era’s tech may seem quaint today – they fret about cameras that do not require the subject to sit for minutes (so allowing surreptitious photography)² and the expansion of the print media (so allowing widespread distribution of secrets).  But the idea that this makes a difference in what the rule of law should be seems fresh today, even as the particular technologies have changed and have, some would say, multiplied these concerns geometrically.  Yet just in pushing a theme that technology means change and change means legal reform, this article is a crucial advancement in legal thought.  Their argument gave specific attention to one fast-changing example of what Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. had previously called the law’s need to respond to the felt necessities of the time.³

      Moreover, the article’s influence has extended beyond substantive tort law, even past the far broader notions of privacy enforced by courts today.  Apart from its take on the specific subject, it appears to be, less famously, a pioneering and educational model of what a great legal article or book should be.⁴   It has influenced generations of law professors, practitioners, and judges in how to write about law and to fashion a persuasive argument – in articles, briefs, and judicial opinions having nothing

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1