The Right to Privacy vs. Protection from Criminals

The Bill of Rights does not contain the words "right to privacy." But, especially in the twentieth century, many Americans would begin to consider this, in the words of Justice Louis Brandeis, "the most comprehensive of rights and the most highly valued by civilized man." Modern technology--cameras, telephones, listening devices, computers--all contributed to making many citizens feel as though they were at least potentially under surveillance. Similarly, citizens are keenly aware that government, corporations, schools, doctors' offices, and other organizations maintain substantial records on them. Americans' insistence on the importance of the right to privacy has also arisen because standards of personal morality, especially concerning sexual relations, have changed markedly in recent decades, and many Americans understandably feel that government has no authority to regulate intimate aspects of citizens' lives.

The Supreme Court declared the existence of a right to privacy in the case of Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), striking down a state law that prohibited the distribution of contraceptive devices or information concerning contraception. According to the Court, the right to privacy, while not specifically mentioned in the Constitution, was "older than the Bill of Rights." The Court's controversial ruling in Roe v. Wade (1973), which protected a woman's right to obtain an abortion in the first months of pregnancy, was also predicated largely on the right to privacy.

The concept of rights was central to the American Revolution, and remains central to American life today. Here at the dawn of the twenty-first century, the eighteenth-century idea of "unalienable rights" seems to remain important to American citizens yet vulnerable to a host of new conditions and challenges unimaginable two hundred years ago.