E. L. Godkin's Criticism of the Penny Press: Antecedents to a Legal Right to Privacy

Abstract

Privacy experts often trace the right to privacy to Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis's 1890 Harvard Law Review essay that called for judges to develop privacy law in the United States. Yet when those attorneys criticized the prying of newspaper journalists, they cited commentary by the Nation's Edwin Lawrence Godkin. Between 1880 and 1890, several periodicals published this leading nineteenth-century editor's press criticism, in which Godkin denounced the sensationalism and triviality of cheap newspapers that exposed domestic life to public scrutiny. This article argues that in his criticism can be found antecedents for American privacy law.