Download This PaperCharles Reich and the Legal History of Privacy
12 Pages Posted: 18 Oct 2021
Date Written: 2021
Abstract
This essay explores what legal scholars can learn from historians and what historians can learn from legal scholarship. It first highlights what legal scholars can learn from historians by reviewing Sarah Igo’s The Known Citizen. Then it provides an alternative legal account to Igo’s history of privacy, which clears up questions that Igo raised but could not answer. Finally, the essay concludes by situating Charles Reich as a link between historians, who read him as a primary source, and law professors, who read his work as legal scholarship. The essay argues that reading Reich as both can deepen our understanding of the history of privacy in the twentieth-century United States.
Keywords: privacy, legal history, Charles Reich
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