You Never Call Me Anymore: Bartnicki v. Vopper and the Supreme Court's Abridgement of the Right of Privacy in Favor of the First Amendment Right of a Free Press

Abstract

INTRODUCTION|More than one hundred years ago, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis first articulated the legal hypothesis that an individual has a right to be free from public exposure of private information about his or her life. However, the proposed right of privacy has been frequently criticized as incompatible with the First Amendment's protection of free expression. Scholars note that the right of privacy proposed by Warren and Brandeis creates a conflict between the right of an individual to control information about themselves and the constitutionally protected right of free speech. The Supreme Court of the United States has rarely addressed the conflicting nature of these two competing interests. The Supreme Court's limited treatment of the conflicting rights, and of the right to privacy in general, has led previous commentators to declare the state of the law "a mess"...