Document Type
Article
Publication Date
6-2024
Abstract
This Article explores the trend of privacy—and what kind of techno-social or legal effect ought to count as a “privacy harm”—expanding to encompass a growing set of social factors. This big-tent approach to privacy has several virtues. However, it also comes with a few costs. While others have explored the conceptual and doctrinal tradeoffs that an expansive approach to privacy may entail, this Article focuses on a secondary effect the trend toward expansiveness has had on the relationship between privacy scholarship and legal scholarship more broadly. This Article suggests that the internal expansiveness of privacy means that insights developed within the field that are of general import for the legal analysis of a digital society are being neglected by legal theory more broadly. Much of the recent development in “privacy law” presents a body of legal-theoretical work that, while holding divergent views on substantive conceptions of what privacy is for, shares a common approach to understanding how interpersonal relations and legal institutions are being impacted and remade in—and by—an increasingly digital society. This approach is not only relevant for scholars of privacy law but is generally useful for understanding and analyzing the legal issues that arise in a pervasively informationalized society. Relegating this common approach to even the expansive doctrinal tent of “privacy law” undersells the methodological value privacy scholarship has to offer a wider body of legal scholarly work.
Recommended Citation
Viljoen, Salome. "The Broader Lessons of Privacy Law." Boston University Law Review 104, no. 4 (2024): 1131-1149.
Comments
© Boston University Law Review 104 B.U. L. Rev. 1131 (2024). Reproduced with permission.