The Right to Privacy in Nineteenth Century America

On December 15, 1890, Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis, two young Boston law partners, published an article in the Harvard Law Review entitled The Right to Privacy. ¹ In that article, they proposed a remedy for invasions of personal privacy by the press. ² More than ninety years later, protection of privacy has become a major concern of the law. Legal scholars have organized the extensive body of case law into a coherent common law of privacy; ³ the Supreme Court has enshrined the right to privacy in the "penumbra" of the Bill of Rights; ⁴ and Congress has enacted additional safeguards. ⁵