Privacy Law Commons^™

The Federalist Provenance Of The Principle Of Privacy, Elvin T. Lim

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The right to privacy is the centerpiece of modern liberal constitutional thought in the United States. But liberals rarely invoke “the Founding” to justify this right, as if conceding that the right to privacy was somehow a radical departure from “original meaning,” perhaps pulled out of the hat by “activist” judges taking great interpretive liberties with the constitutional text. Far from being an unorthodox and modern invention, I argue here that privacy is a principle grounded in the very architecture of the Constitution as enumerated in its Articles, perhaps even more so than in particular sections of the Bill of …