PRIVACY AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE

Abstract

The right to privacy has become one of the most fundamental rights of the individual within society, and it has been widely acknowledged—both among legal systems in liberal states and among theorists of rights—ever since 1890, when Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren wrote their famous article “The Right to Privacy.”¹ There, they laid down “one’s right to be let alone” as an essential part of one’s autonomy, and insisted that one’s private life, habits, acts, relations, etc. should be respected and immunized against external invasion or interference.We think of this right as having a special role in modern life and assume that, as Greg Pence puts it, “some rights of non-interference and some liberties are necessary to the minimally smooth functioning of modern society as we know it.”² Since 1890, it has increasingly become an important task for Human Rights activists and organizations to protect this right of the individual both from governmental invasion and (even more) from the curiosity of the press and the public.