Emergent privacy

Understanding privacy is a problem which attracts immense attention from philosophers and legal scholars. While appearing in Western thought since antiquity, the modern discussion of privacy is usually considered to have begun in a seminal paper by Warren and Brandeis,1 who claimed that a right to privacy should be recognized. However, the philosophical justification and the limits of that right have been a battleground of opposing visions ever since. Unlike other rights (such as property rights), the right to privacy has no clear philosophy that serves as an accepted basis for legislation.