Instantaneous photographs and newspaper enterprise have invaded the sacred precincts of private and domestic life; and numerous mechanical devices threaten to make good the prediction that ” what is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed from the house-tops.”
From an 1890 Harvard Law Review article by Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis. The cite come from this piece by Gordon Crovitz. The article, gated, is here.
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Can we say they were wrong?
As Crovitz perhaps mentions (I haven’t read his column), the Warren-Brandeis article is, I think it’s fair to say, one of the most famous law review articles ever published and the one that put the notion of a legal ‘right to privacy’ into wide circulation (in the US, at least). Like many famous articles, it’s probably more mentioned than read (I don’t believe I’ve ever read it though have probably seen a passage or two excerpted somewhere).