84 Mark Washofsky

individual to respect another’s“privacy” or of a prohibition against trespassing against it. Nonetheless, I shall contend that the tradition does offer a substantive teaching on these matters and that this teaching is invaluable to us as we seek to formulate a progressive halakhic discourse concerning privacy in the Internet age.

My argument will proceed in several stages.

First, I will argue that while the halakhic sources do not explicitly mention a concept of“personal privacy,” that concept— essentially, the obligation to respect the privacy of others— can be established through the method of traditional legal interpretation. The original model for this interpretive move is found in American law. Although the“right to privacy” is never explicitly mentioned in the common law, the U.S. Constitution , or in other foundational legal documents, jurists have constructed that right out of various pre-existing rules, appealing to fundamental principles of the law in order to construct an individual right to protection from unwarranted outside intervention. Various scholars of Jewish law have subsequently applied the same interpretive move to the texts of the halakhah. A close examination of one of these efforts will show how the“value”(if not a“right”) of privacy has been argued in the name of the Jewish legal tradition.

Second, I will argue for the legitimacy of such an argument in Jewish law. This is necessary because of the formidable objections, both substantive and procedural, that some scholars have raised against this interpretive move. I want to answer those objections on the basis of legal theory, Jewish legal history, and the tradition of our own discipline of progressive halakhah.

Finally, I want to consider how this Jewish value of privacy applies in the age of the Internet. Specifically, I will ask whether and to what extent the Internet is something new: does it in fact pose challenges to personal privacy that differ in essential respects from those posed by older technologies and social arrangements to