The Right to Privacy, Personal Autonomy, and Dignity

Any consideration of the right to privacy must begin with Louis D. Brandeis. In a pioneering exposition, Brandeis, then a young legal scholar, asserted in the 1890 Harvard Law Review that the right to privacy means fundamentally “the right to be let alone.” 1 The significance of this article, which he wrote with Samuel Warren, cannot be overstated; it is generally regarded as the most influential law-review article ever published. Thirty-eight years later, as a justice of the Supreme Court, Brandeis expanded on the theme of the article in his dissent in Olmstead v. United States (1928): The right to be let alone … is the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men. To protect that right, every unjustified intrusion of the government upon the privacy of the individual, whatever the means employed, must be deemed a constitutional violation.