Further Reading: Chapter 31 — Privacy as a Right

1. Warren, Samuel D. and Louis D. Brandeis. "The Right to Privacy." Harvard Law Review 4, no. 5 (1890): 193–220.

The founding document of American privacy law. Reading this article in its original form is essential for any serious student of privacy — not just for its legal argument, but for its cultural assumptions and rhetorical strategies. Warren and Brandeis are responding to a specific moment of technological and social change (portable cameras, mass-circulation press) with arguments that have proven extraordinarily durable. Pay attention to the way they ground privacy in personhood rather than property, and note the social milieu from which their concern emerges. The article is freely available through JSTOR and through Harvard Law School's digital archive.

2. Solove, Daniel J. Understanding Privacy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008.

The most comprehensive and philosophically sophisticated treatment of privacy as a legal concept. Solove critiques approaches that define privacy as a single value (solitude, secrecy, control over information) and proposes instead a "taxonomy of privacy" — a contextual, pluralistic account of what privacy violations look like and why they matter. This is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand why privacy is genuinely difficult to define legally, and what an adequate legal framework would need to address. Chapter 2 (on historical approaches) and Chapter 8 (on aggregation and social harms) are especially relevant to this chapter.

3. Kerr, Orin S. "The Case for the Third-Party Doctrine." Michigan Law Review 107, no. 4 (2009): 561–601.

The most sophisticated defense of the third-party doctrine, written by one of the leading Fourth Amendment scholars in the United States. Kerr argues that the third-party doctrine has sound structural justifications — it prevents the Fourth Amendment from being used to protect information that third parties can freely access, which would create anomalous results. Essential reading for understanding the best case for a doctrine that this chapter criticizes, and for developing a sophisticated view of the competing values at stake. Reading Kerr alongside critics (Citron, Skinner-Thompson) provides a rigorous picture of the debate.

4. Richards, Neil M. Why Privacy Matters. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022.

A concise, accessible, and powerful argument for why privacy should be understood as the foundation of intellectual freedom, authentic relationships, and democratic participation — not merely as a preference for secrecy. Richards develops the concept of "intellectual privacy" — the protection of thoughts, reading habits, and beliefs during the formation process. He argues that surveillance is harmful not merely when it reveals secrets but when it chills the process of thinking, exploring, and becoming. Especially relevant to this textbook's recurring theme of the "chilling effect."

5. Schwartz, Paul M. and Daniel J. Solove. "The PII Problem: Privacy and a New Concept of Personally Identifiable Information." New York University Law Review 86 (2011): 1814–1894.

An influential article arguing that privacy law's reliance on the concept of "personally identifiable information" (PII) is fundamentally inadequate in the age of big data and re-identification. The authors show that information that is technically "anonymous" can often be re-identified through combination with other data, making the PII/non-PII distinction unreliable as a legal boundary. This has profound implications for privacy law's effectiveness, particularly for health data, behavioral data, and location data that companies claim is "anonymized."

6. Rosen, Jeffrey. "The Right to Be Forgotten." Stanford Law Review Online 64 (2012): 88–92.

A concise analysis of the right to be forgotten from an American First Amendment perspective. Rosen is sympathetic to the privacy concerns that motivate the right but deeply skeptical about its compatibility with free speech values. He argues that allowing people to erase truthful information from public record — even when that information causes embarrassment or harm — creates dangerous power over the historical record. This short essay provides a rigorous treatment of the EU/US divide on privacy vs. free expression and is an excellent starting point for the philosophical debate.

7. Acquisti, Alessandro, Curtis Taylor, and Liad Wagman. "The Economics of Privacy." Journal of Economic Literature 54, no. 2 (2016): 442–492.

A comprehensive survey of economic research on privacy, covering how privacy affects markets, how people value their own information, why privacy markets fail, and what the economic arguments for and against privacy regulation look like. This is essential for understanding the industry arguments against comprehensive privacy regulation (privacy harms innovation, consumers reveal through their choices that they don't value privacy highly) and for evaluating those arguments critically. The behavioral economics section — which shows that people's stated privacy preferences consistently diverge from their revealed preferences in market settings — is particularly illuminating.

8. Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Surveillance Self-Defense." ssd.eff.org (continuously updated).

The EFF's comprehensive guide to practical privacy and security, maintained and updated by one of the world's leading digital rights organizations. The guide covers threat modeling, encryption tools, mobile device security, account security, and more. It is written for a general audience and is freely available online. For a chapter that ends with practical rights-exercise guidance, this is the most important practical resource. It bridges the gap between legal rights (what the law says you have) and practical tools (what you can actually do). The "Basics" and "Tool Guides" sections are most relevant to this chapter; the "Especially for..." sections address specific populations (activists, journalists, medical professionals, etc.).

9. Zittrain, Jonathan, and others. "Don't Panic: Making Progress on the 'Going Dark' Debate." Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society (February 2016).

A nuanced analysis of the law enforcement "going dark" debate — the argument that end-to-end encryption and other privacy technologies prevent legitimate law enforcement access to communications. The Berkman Klein report pushes back against the "going dark" framing, arguing that we are actually experiencing a "golden age of surveillance" with more data available to law enforcement than ever before, even as specific communication channels become harder to intercept. This report is essential background for Chapter 32 (encryption) and for critically evaluating the argument that privacy technologies harm law enforcement.

10. United Nations General Assembly. "Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Privacy." UN Human Rights Council (annual reports from 2016 to present).

The annual reports of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Privacy provide the authoritative international human rights analysis of global surveillance practices, data protection law, and corporate accountability. Recent reports have addressed: AI and privacy, the right to be forgotten in various legal systems, surveillance in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the relationship between privacy and freedom of expression. These reports are freely available through the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and are essential for understanding how privacy is framed at the international human rights level, which differs significantly from the U.S. legal framework.

For the GDPR text itself, see: Official Journal of the European Union, L 119/1, 4 May 2016. For CCPA/CPRA, see California Civil Code §1798.100 et seq. For key Fourth Amendment cases, the full opinions in Katz, Smith, and Carpenter are freely available through Google Scholar, Justia, and the Supreme Court's official website (supremecourt.gov).