ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a definition of privacy which explains the close connection privacy has with the fourth amendment, and with some of the other amendments in the Bill of Rights; uses the definition to clarify what privacy means in other legal and non-legal contexts. It applies the definition to United States v. White to illustrate how an abstract definition of privacy can affect the analysis of a case. Because privacy is empirically necessary to virtually all of our basic political rights, it is indirectly protected by most of the provisions of the Bill of Rights. For instance, the fifth amendment protection against self-incrimination also protects against imprisonment and the resulting loss of privacy generally necessary to force a confession. A new definition of privacy settles no questions of what protection the law should give to privacy or to the economic, social, and political value of that privacy in any given situation.
