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39 Am. L. Rev. 37 (1905)
The Right of Privacy, and Its Relation to the Law of Libel

handle is hein.journals/amlr39 and id is 41 raw text is: RIGHT OF PRIVACY: RELATION TO THE LAW OF LIBEL. 37 THE RIGHT OF PRIVACY, AND ITS RELATION TO THE LAW OF LIBEL. In Scribnpr's iMagazine for July, 1890, there was published a suggestive paper by the late Mr. E. L. Godkin, entitled The Rights of a Citizen, -To His Own Reputation. After show- ing that society owes most of its protection from disorder, and most of its moral improvement, to the desire which men have of the approbation of their fellow-men, and to a corresponding fear of social condemnation, he argued that it was to the interest of the State to safeguard in every possible way the good repu- tation of its citizens, and to throw about their personal affairs the hedge of secrecy and privacy. He confessed, however, that it was not easy to say in what way the privacy of the individual might be secured by law further than it is now secured to him by the law of slander and libel, and concluded that press laws, more than any others, have to be supported, not merely by the opinions, but by the manners of the community. The difficulty which seemed insurmountable to the journalist, presented itself with all the attractiveness of a problem to be resolved in the crucible of the common law, to two lawyers of the city of Boston. In October of the same year, there ap- peared in the Harvard Law Review 1 an article by Messrs. Louis D. Brandeis and Samuel D. Warren, which, in originality of conception, in facility of reasoning, and in the results to which it has led, is one of the most brilliant excursions in the field of theoretical jurisprudence which the recent literature of the law discloses. Their argument, briefly summarized, was that political, social, and economic changes entail the recognition of new rights, and of new remedies to secure those rights, which the common law, in its eternal youth, expands to meet. Because of this growth, 1 Vol. IV., p. 193.

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