A Secret Weapon?: Applying Privacy Doctrine to the Second Amendment

Abstract

For the past 80 years privacy has been of increasingly important legal concern. In 1952, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Public Utilities Commission of the District of Columbia et al. v. Pollak et al. that plaintiffs had no legal right to avoid radio broadcasts in Washington, D.C. city trolleys and buses. The U.S. Supreme Court distinguished a bus, a public space, from a home, a private space, and ruled that the broadcasts were not inconsistent with public convenience, comfort, or safety because individuals in public are “subject to reasonable limitations in relation to the rights of others.” The lone dissenter, Justice William Douglas, urged, “Liberty . . . must mean more than freedom from unlawful governmental restraint; it must include privacy as well, if it is to be a repository of freedom. The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom.”