Suchergebnisse

As a word, legal concept and institution, privacy is exceptionally challenging. It is easy enough to understand but difficult to define and identify. It is not particularly easy to legislate either. For the legislator, privacy very much resembles Tantalus' fruit: just when it seems to be in reach, it withdraws yet remains temptingly visible.The end result has been an extensive body of legislation in various forms both nationally and internationally.There is more to come, and no end in sight. Privacy is every bit as daunting when considered as a subject to be taught to prospective lawyers and others interested in the law.We are forced to ask where, to whom and how privacy in the legal sense should be taught.As yet privacy does not seem to have a real disciplinary home to call its own in legal research or teaching in any country. Academically, law has thus largely overlooked one of our main fundamental rights – the right to privacy.We have every reason to ask how this is possible and what we can do about it.

Most people believe that the right to privacy is inherently at odds with the right to free speech. Courts all over the world have struggled with how to reconcile the problems of media gossip with our commitment to free and open public debate for over a century. The rise of the Internet has made this problem more urgent. We live in an age of corporate and government surveillance of our lives. And our free speech culture has created an anything-goes environment on the web, where offensive and hurtful speech about others is rife. How should we think about the problems of privacy and free speech?