THE RIGHT OF PRIVACY

Authors

Louis Nizer, Member of the New York bar

Abstract

It is only during the last half-century that the law has recognized the "right to be let alone"-the right under certain circumstances to protect one's name and physiognomy from becoming public property.

No mention of such a right will be found in the works of the great political philosophers and tract-writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries-Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Spencer, Paine. In discoursing on "natural rights," "the state of nature," "social contract," and "the inalienable rights of man," they were concerned only with the power of the state to abridge the liberties of the people. Society had not yet become so complex that the individual's privacy was in danger of encroachment.

Recommended Citation

Louis Nizer, THE RIGHT OF PRIVACY, 39 Mich. L. Rev. 526 (1941).
Available at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr/vol39/iss4/3