Overview

Privacy, in human history, is a relatively recent concept. Nobody had much privacy in the Middle Ages. Even kings and queens lacked privacy: it was an age when crowds watched a queen give birth, and the king received visitors while on the chamber pot. Technology and concepts of privacy grew up together—as both friends and enemies. For example, the late 19th century invention of the candid camera made it possible, for the first time, to take someone’s picture without that person’s consent. This fact was in the background of the classic article by Warren and Brandeis that launched the right of privacy. Today, we have smart phones with cameras, selfies, the Internet, surveillance cameras, and tools that can look through walls, smell through walls, see through walls. Dangers to privacy have multiplied enormously, and we have only just begin figuring how to handle the change. This book is timely as our basic understandings of privacy are challenged by modern technology, changing social mores, and evolving legal understandings that both reflect and reinforce underlying changes in society. It is likely to be of interest to graduate and undergraduate students, scholars, and potentially other professionals with an interest in law and social norms.

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9781538162316

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Reviews

"A book that covers sex, lies, public nudity, revenge porn, transgender identity, national security surveillance, and all kinds of videotapes - while slipping in a sophisticated legal analysis of the ever elusive right to privacy - what fun! Students of privacy everywhere will enjoy his book. --June Carbone, University of Minnesota Law School In this book, Friedman and Grossman sketch the historical development of the concept of privacy and the issues now surrounding it. The premise of this book is that privacy is a social construct--one that is relatively recent and would have been incomprehensible in earlier societies.... All in all, this book sheds light on a part of liberal societies that is both hotly contested and taken for granted.Recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty. -- ""Choice Reviews"" The Walled Garden is an enthralling exploration of the laws of privacy and how we construct rights and obligations out of our secrets. Lawrence Friedman and Joanna Grossman are warm, erudite, witty, and brimming with insight--the best of guides to the ideas, expectations, and rules that define us as individuals and as a society yet are compromised with every website we visit, every post that we like on social media, and every step we take with cell phones in hand. --Daniel J. Sharfstein, Vanderbilt University Law School The Walled Garden provides a fascinating exploration of how the law shapes and is shaped by evolving cultural understandings of privacy. As Lawrence M. Friedman and Joanna L. Grossman make clear in this engaging book, America's willingness to protect privacy, or tolerate invasions, has fluctuated over time and across contexts. You will never think about keeping a secret, posing for a photograph, or walking down the street the same way again. --Jill Elaine Hasday, University of Minnesota Law School, author of Intimate Lies and the Law This is a wonderfully ambitious and remarkably comprehensive book that examines multiple aspects of privacy. By tracing the meaning of privacy in contexts ranging from public nudity to airport security to revenge porn, and offering a comparative perspective, the book compellingly shows that privacy is a social and cultural concept. The authors have written an admirable overview of historical and contemporary interpretations of privacy with a provocative thesis. --Naomi R. Cahn, University of Virginia School of Law"

Author Information

Lawrence M. Friedman is the Marion Rice Kirkwood Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. He is the author of more than forty books and is the most-cited legal historian in the United States. Joanna L. Grossman is the Ellen K. Solender Endowed Chair in Women and Law at SMU Dedman School of Law. She is the author of nine books, including Nine to Five: How Gender, Sex, and Sexuality Continue to Define the American Workplace.

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