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“You Keep Using That Word”: Why Privacy Doesn’T Mean What Lawyers Think, Joshua A.T. Fairfield

Scholarly Articles

This article explores how the need to define privacy has impeded our ability to protect it in law.

The meaning of “privacy” is notoriously hard to pin down. This article contends that the problem is not with the word “privacy,” but with the act of trying to pin it down. The problem lies with the act of definition itself and is particularly acute when the words in question have deep-seated and longstanding common-language meanings, such as liberty, freedom, dignity, and certainly privacy. If one wishes to determine what words like these actually mean to people, definition is the wrong tool …