Laws of Image: Privacy and Publicity in America

Abstract

In the age of social media, the tensions in privacy law have never been greater between the right of individuals to control the legal use of their name or likeness, the desire to share personal images and private lives, and the free-press rights of publishers. In Laws of Image Samantha Barbas provides an accessible, highly readable cultural and legal history of privacy and the balance struck among competing interests over more than a century of litigation and legislation. Readers with little knowledge of the legal history of privacy will learn of the changing legal protections for the use of an individual's image and the cultural influences that shaped the law. More knowledgeable readers will gain new insights about the law and a richer understanding of the cultural context that shapes privacy law. The primary focus in Laws of Images is individuals' right to control the use of their image or likeness in privacy and libel law, or, to use the author's terms, the “law of public image” and the twentieth-century development of “personal image litigation” (p. 1). The book begins, as do most treatments of privacy, in the late nineteenth century with the publication of Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren's article “The Right to Privacy” (Harvard Law Review, Dec. 1890, pp. 193–220). Brandeis and Warren viewed the reporting in the popular press on the personal lives of those in Boston's high society as an invasion of privacy. Barbas argues that the two law professors' primary call was for the “legal right to control one's public image” and that their argument “was a reaction to a new sensitivity to personal image that grew from the demands of social life in an increasingly urban, commercial, mass-mediated society” (pp. 26, 27).