Opinion ID: 1235436
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 10

Heading: The common law right

Text: The origin of the common law right to privacy is often traced to a seminal law review article written at the end of the last century. Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis observed a trend in tort law extending protection beyond property rights to what they described as inviolate personality  the right of determining, ordinarily, to what extent [a person's] thoughts, sentiments, and emotions shall be communicated to others. (Warren & Brandeis, The Right to Privacy (1890) 4 Harv.L.Rev. 193, 205, 198.) Warren and Brandeis attempted to weave together various strands of tort law into a single thread  in Judge Thomas Cooley's phrase, a right `to be let alone.' ( Id. at p. 195.) Nearly 40 years later, Brandeis regarded the privacy right as broad-based and rooted in the federal Constitution. As he stated: The makers of our Constitution ... conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone  the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men. ( Olmstead v. United States (1928) 277 U.S. 438, 478 [72 L.Ed. 944, 956, 48 S.Ct. 564, 66 A.L.R. 376]; (dis. opn. of Brandeis, J.).) The Privacy Initiative's debt to the legal tradition begun by Warren and Brandeis is revealed in ballot arguments: The right of privacy is the right to be left alone. ... It protects our homes, our families, our thoughts, our emotions, our expressions, our personalities, our freedom of communion, and our freedom to associate with the people we choose. (Ballot Argument, supra, at p. 27, italics added.) Seventy years after Warren and Brandeis proposed a right to privacy, Dean William L. Prosser analyzed the case law development of the invasion of privacy tort, distilling four distinct kinds of activities violating the privacy protection and giving rise to tort liability: (1) intrusion into private matters; (2) public disclosure of private facts; (3) publicity placing a person in a false light; and (4) misappropriation of a person's name or likeness. (Prosser, Privacy (1960) 48 Cal.L.Rev. 381, 389.) Prosser's classification was adopted by the Restatement Second of Torts in sections 652A-652E. California common law has generally followed Prosser's classification of privacy interests as embodied in the Restatement. (5 Witkin, Summary of Cal. Law (9th ed. 1988) Torts, §§ 580-594, pp. 674-693.) (4) The privacy tort seeks to vindicate multiple and different interests that range from freedom to act without observation in a home, hospital room, or other private place to the ability to control the commercial exploitation of a name or picture. (Rest.2d Torts, §§ 652B; 652C; see also Miller v. National Broadcasting Co., supra, 187 Cal. App.3d 1463 [television producer and camera crew entered home without permission to film unsuccessful efforts of paramedics to save the life of plaintiff's husband who had suffered heart attack]; Noble v. Sears, Roebuck & Co. (1973) 33 Cal. App.3d 654 [109 Cal. Rptr. 269, 73 A.L.R.3d 1164] [private investigator entered hospital room to interrogate patient]; Civil Code, § 3344 [right to recover damages for knowing use of a person's name, photograph, likeness, voice, or signature for commercial exploitation; statutory right cumulative to the common law].) Each of the four categories of common law invasion of privacy identifies a distinct interest associated with an individual's control of the process or products of his or her personal life. To the extent there is a common denominator among them, it appears to be improper interference (usually by means of observation or communication) with aspects of life consigned to the realm of the personal and confidential by strong and widely shared social norms. The [common law invasion of privacy] tort safeguards the interests of individuals in the maintenance of rules of civility.... [¶] ... [In everyday life we experience privacy] as an inherently normative set of social practices that constitute a way of life, our way of life.... In the tort, `privacy' is simply a label we use to identify one aspect of the many forms of respect by which we maintain a community. It is less important that the purity of the label be maintained, than that the forms of community life of which it is a part be preserved. (Post, The Social Foundations of Privacy (1989) 77 Cal.L.Rev. 957, 1008.) Privacy rights also have psychological foundations emanating from personal needs to establish and maintain identity and self-esteem by controlling self-disclosure: In a society in which multiple, often conflicting role performances are demanded of each individual, the original etymological meaning of the word `person'  mask  has taken on new meaning. [People] fear exposure not only to those closest to them; much of the outrage underlying the asserted right to privacy is a reaction to exposure to persons known only through business or other secondary relationships. The claim is not so much one of total secrecy as it is of the right to define one's circle of intimacy  to choose who shall see beneath the quotidian mask. Loss of control over which `face' one puts on may result in literal loss of self-identity [citations], and is humiliating beneath the gaze of those whose curiosity treats a human being as an object. ( Briscoe v. Reader's Digest Association, Inc. (1971) 4 Cal.3d 529, 534 [93 Cal. Rptr. 866, 483 P.2d 34, 57 A.L.R.3d 1], fn. omitted.) The legally amorphous character of a tort based on social custom and psychological well-being did not escape either common law judges or American Law Institute commentators. The common law right of privacy contains several important limiting principles that have prevented its becoming an all-encompassing and always litigable assertion of individual right. (5) Initially, not every kind of conduct that strays from social custom or implicates personal feelings gives rise to a common law cause of action for invasion of privacy. The various branches of the privacy tort refer generally to conduct that is highly offensive to a reasonable person, thereby emphasizing the importance of the objective context of the alleged invasion, including: (1) the likelihood of serious harm, particularly to the emotional sensibilities of the victim; and (2) the presence or absence of countervailing interests based on competing social norms which may render the defendant's conduct inoffensive; e.g., a legitimate public interest in exposing and prosecuting serious crime that might justify publication of otherwise private information or behavior. [6] Moreover, the plaintiff in an invasion of privacy case must have conducted himself or herself in a manner consistent with an actual expectation of privacy, i.e., he or she must not have manifested by his or her conduct a voluntary consent to the invasive actions of defendant. If voluntary consent is present, a defendant's conduct will rarely be deemed highly offensive to a reasonable person so as to justify tort liability. (Rest.2d Torts, § 652B, com. c [no liability for public observation of plaintiff since he is not then in seclusion, and his appearance is public and open to the public eye]; Gill v. Hearst Publishing Co. (1953) 40 Cal.2d 224, 230 [253 P.2d 441] [plaintiffs waived any right to privacy by a pose voluntarily assumed in a public market place]; Aisenson v. American Broadcasting Co. (1990) 220 Cal. App.3d 146, 162 [269 Cal. Rptr. 379] [One factor relevant to whether an intrusion is `highly offensive to a reasonable person' is the extent to which the person whose privacy is at issue voluntarily entered into the public sphere.]; Melvin v. Reid (1931) 112 Cal. App. 285, 290 [297 P. 91] [no right to privacy in matters publicized with consent: There can be no privacy in that which is already public.]; see also Kapellas v. Kofman (1969) 1 Cal.3d 20, 36-37 [81 Cal. Rptr. 360, 459 P.2d 912].) The maxim of the law volenti non fit injuria (no wrong is done to one who consents) applies as well to the invasion of privacy tort. (Rest.2d Torts, § 892A, com. a; see also Civ. Code, § 3515.) In determining the `offensiveness' of an invasion of a privacy interest, common law courts consider, among other things, the degree of the intrusion, the context, conduct and circumstances surrounding the intrusion as well as the intruder's motives and objectives, the setting into which he intrudes, and the expectations of those whose privacy is invaded. ( Miller v. National Broadcasting Co., supra, 187 Cal. App.3d at pp. 1483-1484.) Thus, the common law right of privacy is neither absolute nor globally vague, but is carefully confined to specific sets of interests that must inevitably be weighed in the balance against competing interests before the right is judicially recognized. A plaintiff's expectation of privacy in a specific context must be objectively reasonable under the circumstances, especially in light of the competing social interests involved. As one commentator has summarized: Through a careful balancing of interests, the courts developed specific [common law] causes of action which protected somewhat well-defined aspects of personal privacy. Although privacy was clearly identified as an interest worthy of some legal protection, courts generally did not give privacy a privileged place or undue weight in the balancing process. (Kelso, California's Constitutional Right to Privacy (1992) 19 Pepperdine L.Rev. 327, 376 [hereafter Kelso].) Our reference to the common law as background to the California constitutional right to privacy is not intended to suggest that the constitutional right is circumscribed by the common law tort. The ballot arguments do not reveal any such limitation. To the contrary, common law invasion of privacy by public disclosure of private facts requires that the actionable disclosure be widely published and not confined to a few persons or limited circumstances. (Rest.2d Torts, § 652D, com. a.) In contrast, the ballot arguments describe a privacy right that prevents government and business interests from collecting and stockpiling unnecessary information about us and or misusing information gathered for one purpose in order to serve other purposes or to embarrass us. (Ballot Argument, supra, at p. 27.) Obviously, sensitive personal information may be misused even if its disclosure is limited. [7] By referring to the common law, we seek merely to draw upon the one hundred years of legal experience surrounding the term privacy in identifying legally protected privacy interests and in describing the process by which such interests are compared and weighed against other values. That experience suggests that the common law's insistence on objectively reasonable expectations of privacy based on widely shared social norms, serious violations of those expectations, and thorough consideration of competing interests, is an invaluable guide in constitutional privacy litigation.