Law Of Privacy Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Law Of Privacy - Essay Example This evaluation fundamentally misses the conceptual approach to tort law advanced by Warren and Brandeis in finding a right to privacy and elaborating some aspects ÃŽ ¿f that right. They did not identify a new tort, but rather a new right that ought to be protected by tort law. That new right in turn was derived from an old right, perhaps a natural right, namely the right to be let alone. In light ÃŽ ¿f these origins, it would have been surprising if the tort protection given to privacy remained confined within the narrow bounds ÃŽ ¿f public disclosure. The very theory ÃŽ ¿f torts upon which privacy was based implied its fluidity. I have sought in the preceding sections to show how Warren and Brandeis viewed tort law as the law defining and protecting rights, and how this view was at odds with other conceptions ÃŽ ¿f tort law that emerged at the end ÃŽ ¿f the nineteenth century and eventually prevailed. Holmess defendant-based instrumentalist vision provided the conceptual foundation ÃŽ ¿f tort law well into the twentieth century. Strict liability largely gave way to negligence, even in such bastions ÃŽ ¿f rights-based thinking as property. The common law, and most particularly the law ÃŽ ¿f torts, became the domain ÃŽ ¿f reasonableness rather than rights. Intentional torts, once the focus ÃŽ ¿f torts, receded to near irrelevance. Indeed, despite occasional manifestations ÃŽ ¿f life, intentional torts have remained in a formal structure much like the writ system from which they are descended. This in essence has been the fate ÃŽ ¿f privacy. Promulgated as part ÃŽ ¿f a jurisprudence ÃŽ ¿f rights, with strong natural law overtones, the privacy tort had no intellectual place in modern tort law. Rights now belong to the language ÃŽ ¿f public law discourse rather than private law discourse. Prossers 1960 article stands as the modern source ÃŽ ¿f the privacy tort. Prossers analysis is a return to the essentials ÃŽ ¿f the writ system that continue to