Prosecutors and congressional investigators have lately gone after diaries long held to be private. Gossip is no longer the resource of the idle and vicious, but has become a trade. . . . But Brandeis was not just decrying random invasions of privacy. The villain of his piece was . . . In this as in other branches of commerce, the supply creates its own demand.
Triviality destroys at once robustness of thought and delicacy of feeling.
Brandeis understood that private commerce could pillage the privacy, as well as the economic security, of the individual. We are surely more consistent civil libertarians. Liberals have quite properly used the state to expand the domain of rights as a strategy of increasing personal liberties, especially for groups whose liberties were previously constrained by slavery, segregation, and racial and sex discrimination. But if a black person was consigned to the scullery, or if a woman was doing more than her share of housework and child-rearing, that reality was not just the product of domestic negotiations, or of biology. A seeming domestic quarrel about mundane chores was really a much more profound political fight.