Opinion ID: 2976326
Heading Depth: 5
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Existence of a fundamental right

Text: The district court recognized that this court’s precedents require a showing of a privacy interest that implicates a right that is either “fundamental” or “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.” See Bloch, 156 F.3d at 684. After reviewing Kallstrom and Bloch, it concluded that Lambert could not meet this standard because she had “only identified a risk of financial harm.” This harm, the court noted, “bears no equivalence to the potential and actual harm suffered by the Kallstrom and Bloch plaintiffs, respectively.” The court therefore refused to balance Lambert’s privacy interest against the Defendants’ interest in making public records available on the internet. Lambert disputes the district court’s conclusion that her harm does not meet the first prong of the test for informational-privacy claims, arguing that the Defendants’ invasion of her privacy implicates her fundamental rights. There are two ways for Lambert to demonstrate that a fundamental right underlies her privacy claim. The first would be to link her interest in nondisclosure to an already established fundamental right. Indeed, this is how the plaintiffs in Kallstrom and Bloch succeeded. See Bloch, 156 F.3d at 685 (acknowledging the well-recognized right to privacy in intimate matters); Kallstrom, 136 F.3d at 1062-63 (describing the long history of the right to bodily integrity). Lambert attempts to make this showing by claiming that, like the police officers in Kallstrom, her fundamental liberty interest in personal security was compromised by the Clerk’s actions. Alternatively, Lambert could attempt to identify a new fundamental right that was implicated by the public disclosure of her Social Security number. Because the very notion of a fundamental right is rooted in substantive due process, such rights must be based on a protectible interest in life, liberty, or property. See Does v. Munoz, 507 F.3d 961, 965 (6th Cir. 2007) (explaining that some deprivations of life, liberty or property are subject to substantive limitations that provide “heightened protection against government interference with certain fundamental rights” (citations and internal quotation marks omitted)). But this court has recognized that “identifying a new fundamental right subject to the protections of substantive due process is often an uphill battle, as the list of fundamental rights is short.” Id. (internal quotation marks omitted). Any fundamental right, moreover, must be either “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” or “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.” Id. (internal quotation marks omitted). No. 07-3154 Lambert v. Hartman et al. Page 9 Lambert asserts that the privacy invasion she has alleged is related to (1) her right to personal security, (2) her right to her reputation and good name, and (3) her right to property. She describes the first two as fundamental liberty interests, and the third as a fundamental property interest.
Lambert asserts that the disclosure of her Social Security number implicates two liberty interests. First, she characterizes the theft of her identity as an interference with the right to personal security recognized in Kallstrom. She then describes the damage to her credit rating as an injury to her reputation, which she claims this court has recognized as a fundamental liberty interest. Lambert’s attempt to characterize the Clerk’s action as an interference with her right to personal security as discussed in Kallstrom is unpersuasive. The Kallstrom court unambiguously identified the right involved in that case as one of personal security and bodily integrity, making clear that the fundamental right at issue was a protection against physical invasions. Indeed, the court in Kallstrom noted that not even all risks of physical harm created by disclosure would trigger the right to privacy under the Fourteenth Amendment. Rather, the officers in that case could invoke constitutional protection only because they were placed “at substantial risk of serious bodily harm, possibly even death, from a perceived likely threat.” Kallstrom, 136 F.3d at 1064. Lambert does not argue that the Clerk’s actions put her at any risk of physical harm. And although she is undoubtedly correct that identity theft constitutes a serious personal invasion, it simply does not implicate the well-established right to personal security as contemplated by this court in Kallstrom. Cf. Barber v. Overton, 496 F.3d 449, 456 (6th Cir. 2007) (declining to recognize a privacy interest of a constitutional dimension where prison officials inadvertently released the Social Security numbers of prison guards to inmates, and concluding that “the release of the social security numbers was not sensitive enough nor the threat of retaliation apparent enough to warrant constitutional protection here”). Lambert next claims that the harm to her “creditworthiness” constitutes a reputational injury that implicates a fundamental liberty interest. Despite the obvious reputational interests at play in Bloch, Lambert makes no attempt to analogize her harm to that of the injury suffered by the rape victim in that case. She instead relies on this court’s decision in Chilingirian v. Boris, 882 F.2d 200 (6th Cir. 1989), for the proposition that “a person’s reputation, good name, honor, and integrity are among the liberty interests” protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. Id. at 205 (citing Board of Regents v. Roth, 408 U.S. 564, 573 (1972)). Even accepting the questionable assertion that one’s credit rating is the type of reputational interest protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the fact that this court has recognized a liberty interest in one’s reputation does not necessarily mean that such an interest is either “fundamental” or “inherent in the concept of ordered liberty.” Cf. Does, 507 F.3d at 965 (explaining that substantive due process protects only “certain fundamental rights and liberty interests,” and noting that the “list of fundamental rights is short” (internal quotation marks omitted)). Moreover, the plaintiff in Chilingirian brought a procedural due process claim, and this court concluded that an informal “name-clearing hearing” provided sufficient protection of the plaintiff’s liberty interest in his reputation. Chilingirian, 882 F.2d at 205-06. But the very fact that an informal hearing was sufficient to protect Chilingirian’s liberty interest in his reputation negates Lambert’s claim that the interest involved was fundamental. See Does, 507 F.3d at 964 (noting that certain deprivations of liberty fundamental enough to violate a person’s right to substantive due process “are subject to limitations regardless of the adequacy of the procedures employed” (emphasis added) (internal quotation marks omitted)). Lambert has provided no support for the proposition that the harm to her credit implicates a liberty interest that any court has recognized as fundamental, and her argument to the contrary is No. 07-3154 Lambert v. Hartman et al. Page 10 simply unpersuasive. Furthermore, she does not even begin to meet the hurdle required for the recognition of a new fundamental right. The protection of a person’s credit is a concept relating to one’s finances and economic well-being, one that by its very nature bears no relationship to the kinds of interests that are “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.” See Overstreet v. LexingtonFayette Urban County Gov’t, 305 F.3d 566, 575 (6th Cir. 2002) (affirming the denial of a preliminary injunction to a county employee who challenged a policy mandating public disclosure of real estate holdings because “[t]he privacy interest one may have in one’s personal finances and real estate holdings is far afield from [the] intimate concerns” recognized as fundamental privacy interests); cf. Cutshall v. Sundquist, 193 F.3d 466, 481 (6th Cir. 1999) (rejecting a challenge to a state sex-offender registry on constitutional privacy grounds because the law did “not impose any restrictions on [the plaintiff’s] personal rights that are fundamental or implicit in the concept of ordered liberty, such as his procreative or marital rights”). We therefore agree with the district court that Lambert’s injuries are more properly described as financial in nature and not truly liberty interests at all.
Although this court has never acknowledged a constitutional right to privacy based on the infringement of a property interest, Lambert urges us to recognize such a right in this case. She contends that the Clerk’s disclosure of her Social Security number implicated her “fundamental right to property,” and that we should proceed to balance her privacy interest against the government’s purpose in publishing records on the internet. The Defendants, in contrast, contend that Kallstrom and Bloch make clear that this court will recognize a privacy interest of constitutional magnitude only if a fundamental liberty interest is implicated. Even if we were prepared to recognize a constitutional privacy interest based on a property right, Lambert’s claim would fail because she has not demonstrated that she had a constitutionally protectible property interest in her personal information. See Silver v. Franklin Twp. Bd. Of Zoning Appeals, 966 F.2d 1031, 1036 (6th Cir. 1992) (“To establish a violation of substantive due process, a plaintiff must first establish the existence of a constitutionally-protected property . . . interest.”). Lambert never articulates precisely what property deprivation the Defendants’ exacted upon her, although we presume that she is referring to the various financial injuries she suffered. The Defendants, however, are correct to point out that this court’s precedents are not amenable to the recognition of a constitutional right to privacy based on the infringement of a property interest. See, e.g., Overstreet, 305 F.3d at 575 (declining to recognize a privacy interest of constitutional dimension “in one’s personal finances and real estate holdings”); Bloch, 156 F.3d at 684 (noting that this court has “extend[ed] the right to informational privacy only to interests that implicate a fundamental liberty interest” (emphasis added)). Lambert has undoubtedly shown that, as a policy matter, the Clerk’s decision to provide unfettered internet access to people’s Social Security numbers was unwise. This much is evidenced by the fact that the Defendants have subsequently removed the citations in question from the website and changed the local rules to better protect sensitive personal information. But to constitutionalize a harm of the type Lambert has suffered would be to open a Pandora’s box of claims under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, a step that we are unwilling to take. See Paul v. Davis, 424 U.S. 693, 699 (1976) (rejecting a § 1983 claim against police officials who included the plaintiff’s name and mug shot on a flyer warning local merchants about possible shoplifters, and explaining that the plaintiff’s legal argument “would seem almost necessarily to result in every legally cognizable injury which may have been inflicted by a state official acting under ‘color of law’ establishing a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment”). Indeed, absent a showing of an infringement of a right that is “fundamental or implicit in the concept of ordered liberty,” this court’s precedents bar an action under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 from proceeding any further. Lambert has simply failed to make such a showing. No. 07-3154 Lambert v. Hartman et al. Page 11