Privacy's Other Path
Dan Solove writes:
Professor Neil Richards (Washington University School of Law) and I have posted on SSRN our new article, Privacy’s Other Path: Recovering the Law of Confidentiality, 96 Georgetown Law Journal __ (forthcoming 2007). The article engages in an historical and comparative discussion of American and English privacy law, a topic that has been relatively unexplored in America.
Although the tort law of privacy in America and England arose from the very same common law cases, the law has developed on very different paths in each country. For example, in England, a friend, spouse, lover, or nearly anybody else who violates a confidence can be liable. In America, people are said to assume the risk of betrayal for many breaches of confidence; the law, however, protects against the invasion of privacy by strangers. How and why did the law develop so differently in America and England? Our new article explores the answers to these questions and debunks many myths in the conventional wisdom about privacy law.
See “Privacy’s Other Path” on Concurring Opinions. The article is pretty easy reading, and I recommend it highly.