Privacy's Tangled History and Its Tenuous Post-Dobbs Future

In 2022, the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, finding that abortion did not appear as a right in the Constitution and had no support in U.S. history. What the Justices did not explain is that the law of privacy more generally has significant historical roots from the time of the Founders. The Justices also didn’t say that what privacy means has often been explained by the self-interested in ways that have impacted other people, publishing, politics, and much more. They also didn’t say that privacy has no future. In fact, while the right to autonomy in making certain profoundly significant personal decisions appears on shaky ground after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, the legal right to maintain the secrecy of personal information appears to be expanding, even at the expense of the First Amendment. In a world in which the right to privacy is contested from many angles, how might we attempt to define privacy today in a way that defends democracy but also protects the people?

Amy Gajda, The Class of 1937 Professor of Law at Tulane University Law School, is a former jour­nalist and one of the country’s top experts on privacy and the media. She is author of the book "Seek and Hide: The Tangled History of the Right to Privacy" (Viking, 2022).

Her lecture, held October 26, 2022, was sponsored by the McFarland Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture at Holy Cross.

Видео Privacy's Tangled History and Its Tenuous Post-Dobbs Future канала College of the Holy Cross