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denominator is a concern for the human personality rather than the protection of a property interest. For example, Prosser thinks that the basis for the tort of intrusion is the infliction of mental distress, regarded by the law as a property right. He is therefore puzzled that courts allow plaintiffs to collect in intrusion cases in the absence of“genuine and serious mental harm.” Bloustein is not puzzled at all; once we move to a higher degree of conceptualization and realize that the right to privacy is based in the conception of human dignity, courts are able and entitled to extend the tort of intrusion to cases where it had not previously applied. In this way, the law provides guidance as to the future development of the right to privacy in an age of sophisticated technology.” Similarly, Jeffrey Reiman rejects the suggestion by Thomson that privacy is“derivative” of other rights. Privacy, rather, is“a social ritual by means of which an individual’s moral title to his existence is conferred,” a social practice by which the group recognizes the individual’s moral right to shape his own destiny.” Thus, Prosser’s separate torts may themselves be “derivative” of the right to privacy(rather than the other way around, as Thomson would have it), the necessary conceptual precondition to them all;“(privacy) is the right to conditions necessary for me to think of myself as the kind of entity for whom it would be meaningful and important to claim personal and property rights.” The Israeli jurist Ruth Gavison approached the issue somewhat differently, appealing to our normal and accepted patterns of thought and speech;“unlike the reductionists, most of us consider privacy to be a useful concept.” While it is true that the concept is difficult to specify, that should be taken as a challenge to render it coherent. Like Bloustein, she argued that a“useful” conception of privacy will enable us to decide just what sorts of occasions warrant legal protection.*

The foregoing brief survey suggests how the common law right to privacy was constructed into existence. Beginning with protections long offered against various sorts of intrusion, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis identified a fundamental moral principle behind all of them:“the inviolate personality,” or, as others have it,“human