Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/19pdf/18-1323_c07d.pdf
Page Number: 76

Cite as:  591 U. S. ____ (2020) 

15 

THOMAS, J., dissenting 

their  “penumbras,”  which  were  “formed  by  emanations 
from  those  guarantees  that  help  give  them  life  and  sub-
stance.”  Ibid.  This reasoning is as mystifying as it is base-
less. 

As  Justice  Black  observed  in  his  dissent,  this  general
“right  of  privacy”  was  never  before  considered  a  constitu-
tional guarantee protecting citizens from governmental in-
trusion.  Id.,  at  508–510.    Rather,  the  concept  was  one  of 
tort  law,  championed  by  Samuel  Warren  and  the  future 
Justice Louis Brandeis in their 1890 Harvard Law Review 
article entitled, “The Right to Privacy.”  4 Harv. L. Rev. 193. 
Over 20 years after the Fourteenth Amendment was rati-
fied and a century after the Bill of Rights was adopted, War-
ren and Brandeis were among the first to advocate for this 
privacy  right  in  the  context  of  tort  relief  for  those  whose 
personal information and private affairs were exploited by 
others.  Id.,  at  193,  195–196,  214–220.    By  “exalting  a
phrase . . . used in discussing grounds for tort relief, to the 
level of a constitutional rule,” the Court arrogated to itself 
the “power to invalidate any legislative act which [it] find[s]
irrational, unreasonable[,] or offensive” as an impermissi-
ble “interfere[nce] with ‘privacy.’ ”  Griswold, supra, at 510, 
n. 1, 511 (Black, J., dissenting).

Just  eight  years  later,  the  Court  utilized  its  newfound 
power  in  Roe  v.  Wade,  410  U. S.  113  (1973).    There,  the 
Court struck down a Texas law restricting abortion as a vi-
olation of a woman’s constitutional “right of privacy,” which 
it grounded in the “concept of personal liberty” purportedly 
protected  by  the  Due  Process  Clause  of  the  Fourteenth 
Amendment.  Id., at 153.  The Court began its legal analysis
by openly acknowledging that the Constitution’s text does
not “mention any right of privacy.”  Id., at 152.  The Court 
nevertheless  concluded  that  it  need  not  bother  with  our 
founding  document’s  text,  because  the  Court’s  prior  deci-
sions—chief  among  them  Griswold—had  already  divined 
such a right from constitutional penumbras.  Roe, 410 U. S.,