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As late as 1890, the word "privacy" did not occur in legal literature. In that year a socially prominent young Boston lawyer named Samuel D. Warren took offense at a local gossip sheet that had assiduously reported on every party that he and his wife gave, and they gave many. With a colleague, the young Louis Brandeis, he wrote an article for the Harvard Law Review that first enunciated "The Right to Privacy." The authors' key point, which Brandeis re-emphasized later from the Supreme Court bench: "The right to life has come to mean the right to enjoy life—the right to be let alone." Since then, some 30 states have recognized a right of privacy as common law, and seven have enacted specific statutes protecting the individual's privacy.
Laws & Penumbrae
Such laws, including those touching on the press, are still surrounded by uncertainties. The right of the press to publish and the public to know any significant fact is taken to be paramount, and in the case of public figures, almost anything can be significant, right down to the exact state of a President's intestines. Those who voluntarily display themselves, including entertainers, are also presumed to have forfeited their right in some measure. In recent years entertainers have been loud in their pleas for privacy, including a Frank Sinatra, who will take a 20-year-old actress on a yacht trip and then complain that the press is invading his private life.
In the case of more obscure people, what makes a figure public is often painfully difficult to define. In a classic example, is a newspaper violating privacy by publishing the photograph of a woman jumping to her death? Her husband thought so, and sued the Los Angeles Examiner. But the state courts ruled in effect that by choosing such a spectacular method of killing herself, his wife had made herself a public figure, thereby forfeiting the right of privacy.
The biggest legal milestone in this field was last year's Supreme Court decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, which overthrew the state's law against the use of contraceptives as an invasion of marital privacy, and for the first time declared the "right of privacy" to be derived from the Constitution itself. Justice Douglas argued that "specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras formed by emanations from those guarantees. Various guarantees create zones of privacy." Such zones, he argued, emanate from the First Amendment's right of association, and the Fourth's guarantee against "unreasonable searches and seizures." Justice Black dissented: "I like my privacy as well as the next one, but I am nevertheless compelled to admit that government has a right to invade it unless prohibited by some specific constitutional provision."
Idiot & Fortress