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Salus populi suprema lex: law and public health
It is unquestionable, that the legislature can confer police powers upon public officers, for the protection of the public health. The maxim salus populi suprema lex is the law of all courts and countries. The individual right sinks in the necessity to provide for the public good.
February 2016 / 2 min.
Doctor-patient privilege and the common law
Despite being part of the original Hippocratic oath, doctor-patient confidentiality is a relatively new addition to Anglo-American law.
December 2015 / 2 min.
Thinking about evidence and causation in same-sex marriage arguments
A recurring theme in criticisms of allowing same-sex marriage – or, as Obergefell did, in finding that bans violated the fundamental right to marriage – is some variation of the “slippery slope.”
July 2015 / 3 min.
Privacy, liberty, dignity: Kennedy in Obergefell
Kennedy took a fascinating approach to discussing fundamental rights in Obergefell, making an argument that combined substantive due process with equal protection. To do this, he moved away from “privacy,” used in many of the cases he cited, to “dignity” and “liberty.” Using the term “liberty” instead of “privacy” (as in Griswold and Roe v. Wade) when discussing issues of […]
July 2015 / 2 min.
Preserving Jeffersonian ideals through government regulation
In the contentious years of Gilded Age America – 1870-1900 – the general consensus has been than the United States, laissez-faire capitalism and “liberty of contract.” Reality, unsurprisingly, was more complex.
November 2014 / 5 min.
David Seipp on Themes of the Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric of Privacy
In his late 1970s work, The Right to Privacy in American History, David J. Seipp argues that the “unity of the privacy phenomenon” in the nineteenth century came not from a singleness of motive, but rather from “a unity of language” (Seipp 116).
October 2014 / 4 min.
Sex and Eugenics Sterilization
In looking through Johanna Schoen’s 2005 book, Choice & Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare, it appears that, although eugenics-based sterilization procedures in the early-to-mid twentieth century appear to have targeted women more than men, men were also sterilized through these programs.
October 2014 / 4 min.
The “third-party problem”: one reason telegrams were not constitutionally protected
Unlike postal mail or, later, the telephone, telegrams never received constitutional protection. Yet they were the quintessential nineteenth-century technology of communication, used extensively for business, government, and personal communication, much of which both senders and receivers would have wished to keep to themselves.
January 2014 / 2 min.
Universities UK, sex segregation, and the public-private distinction
Misunderstanding the different balances required in private vs. public spheres was one of the fundamental misunderstandings of the recent Universities UK guidance, which argued that speakers’ freedom of religion and speech could trump anti-discrimination laws at on-campus debates – meaning that audiences might be segregated by sex.
December 2013 / 4 min.
Musings on law, technology, and privacy
I’ve been working on my dissertation for a few months now (it looks at American privacy law over some 150 years, and investigates how technology interacts with that law). Some of that work will emerge here in draft form eventually, but for now I’ve been thinking about the theoretical/critical framework for my work. Much of this framework will be implicit – since I’m writing a dissertation in history – but it will guide me nonetheless. It will develop throughout the writing process, but here are some initial thoughts.
December 2013 / 3 min.