Privacy’s Other Path: Recovering the Law of Confidentiality
posted by Neil Richards
Dan and I have just uploaded the final published version of our article, Privacy’s Other Path: Recovering the Law of Confidentiality up on SSRN. The paper is in print in the latest volume of the Georgetown Law Journal and we’re both very excited it’s out. Our paper tells the story of how privacy and confidentiality law diverged in Britain and America after 1890, how they have begun to converge once again in recent years, and how the law of confidentiality holds great promise for American law as it continues to grapple with the problems of personal information. Here’s the abstract:
The familiar legend of privacy law holds that Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis invented the right to privacy in 1890, and that William Prosser aided its development by recognizing four privacy torts in 1960. In this article, Professors Richards and Solove contend that Warren, Brandeis, and Prosser did not invent privacy law, but took it down a new path. Well before 1890, a considerable body of Anglo-American law protected confidentiality, which safeguards the information people share with others. Warren, Brandeis, and later Prosser turned away from the law of confidentiality to create a new conception of privacy based on the individual’s inviolate personality. English law, however, rejected Warren and Brandeis’s conception of privacy and developed a conception of privacy as confidentiality from the same sources used by Warren and Brandeis. Today, in contrast to the individualistic conception of privacy in American law, the English law of confidence recognizes and enforces expectations of trust within relationships. Richards and Solove explore how and why privacy law developed so differently in America and England. Understanding the origins and developments of privacy law’s divergent paths reveals that each body of law’s conception of privacy has much to teach the other.
October 23, 2007 at 3:56 pm
Posted in: Articles and Books, First Amendment, History of Law, International & Comparative Law, Law School (Scholarship), Legal Theory, Media Law, Privacy, Tort Law
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