Key Documents: Section I. Journalism, Media, and the Law - Privacy Protection

Privacy protection has generally been considered perhaps the most nebulous and contentious area of media-related law. The word privacy does not appear anywhere in the U.S. Constitution or the Bill of Rights, and privacy law did not begin to evolve until 1890 when two lawyers, Louis Brandeis (a future Supreme Court justice) and Samuel Warren, wrote an article in the Harvard Law Review that argued for a “right to privacy” to keep “newspaper enterprise” from invading the “sacred precincts of private and domestic life.” In the decades to follow, most states passed statutes and courts generated a wide range of common law to regulate the right to privacy versus the First Amendment right of the press to foster a free flow of ideas and information. But privacy law did not get really organized until 1960 when law school dean William Prosser wrote an article that divided it into four The ...

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