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But beyond the obvious fact that many Americans were not free–women and African-Americans, in particular–lies a deeper reality: Americans in the nineteenth century did not live without rules, regulations, and laws, and did not rely strictly on private contract and personal responsibility to conduct business or to handle social relations.
Problems with treating privacy as a property right
One approach to dealing with privacy would be to extend property rights to cover information or personal data, rather as copyright, patents, trademarks, and other forms of intellectual property extended physical rules into the realm of the intangible. While there are undoubtedly benefits to this, there are limitations as well
Contract law in the antebellum 19th century
The common law before the nineteenth century required contracts to be fair and reasonable: a “sound price warrants a sound commodity.” But by mid-century, William Wetmore Story’s famous treatise on contracts recognized that this basic understanding had radically altered. Contracts now required only “mutual assent of the parties” and “valuable consideration.”
