(albeit an“interstitial” one).''* We need not engage in a detailed study of this controversy, much less resolve it in favor of either side. The important thing to note is that, in the view of both camps, general principles— whatever their legal or extralegal conceptual status- do act as a source of legal decision. Judges cannot do their job without resorting to such principles, even if principles, in comparison to rules, perform a limited(marginal? modest?) systemic function in judicial discourse. Even if many positivists would deny to general principles the status of“law,” they would agree with Dworkin that, inasmuch as they are indispensable to the resolution of difficult cases(i.e., cases for which the existing rules are not dispositive), principles are fundamental to the law’s growth, development, and modification. Any case study in legal change would serve to demonstrate this point. How else, after all, do we account for the achievement of Warren and Brandeis , who utilized principles as a tool for the construction of new legal meaning(the existence of a tort of privacy) out of the existing sources, as a way of lending them coherence and purpose?
We come, therefore, to our response to Blidstein’s legal rationale: general principles of Jewish law can function in the same way. To borrow Dworkin’s language, the four existing provisions of Jewish law that we have noted— the prohibition against unwarranted trespass, hezek r’iyah, the penalty imposed for reading a letter intended for another person, and the rules concerning prohibited Speech— constitute the“data” or precedents for which we seek a coherent explanation. That explanation, the theory that offers the best available interpretation of the halakhah as it exists, is based upon the principle gadol k vod hab'riyot. The tradition’s teachings concerning“human dignity” allow us to posit the existence of a connecting thread, a theory that lends coherence to the data. That theory is what Rakover calls the“value” of individual privacy.