90 Mark Washofsky
right to privacy, and the law has no new principle to formulate when it extends this protection to the personal appearance, sayings, acts, and to personal relation, domestic or otherwise.”
In this way did Warren and Brandeis discover the existence a tort, a specific legal right and cause for action where none had explicitly existed before. The verb choice is crucial: the authors do not claim to have invented the right to privacy but rather to have identified it, along with the principle of“inviolate personality” that serves as its conceptual foundation, within the sources of the law. As can be expected with newly-discovered rights, it took some time for this one to gain wide acceptance. American courts argued for decades over whether to accept or reject the Warren-Brandeis thesis. By the mid-20" century, however, judges and statutemakers had generally enshrined the right to privacy in the law books.” Lawyers also discovered the right to privacy in the U.S. Constitution . At first, this too was a minority position, enunciated in 1928 by none other than Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis in his famous dissent in the case Olmstead v. U.S:“(The framers of the Constitution ) sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the government, the right to be let alone- the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.” Eventually, the Supreme Court came to accept Brandeis ’s position, recognizing the existence of the right to privacy in the Constitution . That right afforded the individual protection against government intrusion with respect to electronic eavesdropping®® and family planning.”® The American legal discussion was simply one aspect of a broad cultural development that encompassed many societies. In 1948, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights , expressing the growing conviction acceptance of the right to privacy in international law:“No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.”