ABSTRACT

The political privacy’s qualities have been left to be developed by implication from decisions pivoted on grounds more familiar to the legal practitioner. The larger framework of the political order within which both the Court and the legislature work recognized certain categories of analysis as inappropriate to the legislature's organizing and expressing its view of the world. Courts can fulfill their responsibility in a democratic society only to the extent that they succeed in shaping their judgments by rational standards, and rational standards are both impersonal and communicable. In the rebellion of life and of reason against the restricting force of nineteenth-century mediocrity and arbitrary will, the Court has used a whole set of instruments. The instruments include freedom of religion to the right to anonymity, freedom from arbitrary search and seizure, freedom from self-incrimination, freedom of associational privacy, and the secrecy of the ballot.