June 2006 Issue

Cover Story

The Search is On

Recent inventions and business methods call attention to the next step which must be taken for the protection of the person, and for securing to the individual ... the right ‘to be let alone.’ ”

When Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis wrote that in 1890 in a Harvard Law Review article called “The Right to Privacy,” the nation was at the dawn of a technology revolution. Photography and a rambunctious press had shrunk people’s zones of privacy. Soon, the telephone and the radio would draw the walls closer. Next came television. In exchange for intimacy, people had to rethink what it meant to be let alone.

The world is experiencing another technology revolution. The Internet, microchips and the Global Positioning System make this a faster, closer—but more jittery—world. What is the “next step” in the right to be let alone? The law is catching up, but many say too slowly. They fear the concerns of another writer: “You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and ... every movement scrutinized.” The author: George Orwell. The book: 1984.

Feature Section

Miranda’s Reprieve

June marks the 40th anniversary of one of the most praised, most maligned—and probably one of the most misunderstood—U.S. Supreme Court cases in American history, Miranda v. Arizona.

Case-By-Case Tort Reform

Lawrence A. Sutter knows the automobile manufacturers and other companies he represents in product liability cases don’t want to pay good money for him to make bad plays. But the former small-college running back also knows when to cut back and run through an opening in the line.