This post is authored by Swati Punia.
We are excited to announce the addition of privacy jurisprudence from the United States’ Supreme Court on the Privacy Law Library. These cases cover a variety of subject areas from the right against intrusive search and seizure to the right to abortion and right to sexual intimacy/ relationships. You may access all the US cases on our database, here.
(The Privacy Law Library is our global database of privacy law and jurisprudence, currently containing cases from India, Europe (ECJ and ECtHR), the United States, and Canada.)
The Supreme Court of the US (SCOTUS) has carved out the right to privacy from various provisions of the US constitution, particularly the first, fourth, fifth, ninth and fourteenth amendments to the US constitution. The Court has included the right to privacy in varying contexts through an expansive interpretation of the constitutional provisions. For instance, the Court has read privacy rights into the first amendment for protecting private possession of obscene material from State intrusion; the fourth amendment for protecting privacy of the person and possessions from unreasonable State intrusion; and the fourteenth amendment which recognises an individual’s decisions about abortion and family planning as part of their right of liberty that encompasses aspects of privacy such as dignity and autonomy under the amendment’s due process clause.
The right to privacy is not expressly provided for in the US constitution. However, the Court identified an implicit right to privacy, for the very first time, in Griswold v. Connecticut(1965) in the context of the right to use contraceptives/ marital privacy. Since then, the Court has extended the scope to include, inter alia, reasonable expectation of privacy against State intrusion in Katz v. United States (1967), abortion rights of women in Roe v. Wade (1973), and right to sexual intimacy between consenting adults of the same-sex in Lawrence v. Texas (2003).
The US privacy framework consists of several privacy laws and regulations developed at both the federal and state level. As of now, the US privacy laws are primarily sector specific, instead of a single comprehensive federal data protection law like the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Canadian Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). However, there are certain states in the US like California that have enacted comprehensive privacy laws, comparable to the GDPR and PIPEDA. The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) which came into effect on January 1, 2020 aims to protect consumers’ privacy across industry. It codifies certain rights and remedies for consumers, and obligations for entities/businesses. One of its main aims is to provide consumers more control over their data by obligating businesses to ensure transparency about how they collect, use, share and sell consumer data.
To know more about the status of the right to privacy in the US, refer to our page here. Some of the key privacy cases from the SCOTUS on our database are – Griswold vs. Connecticut, Time INC vs. Hill, Roe vs. Wade, Katz vs. United States, and Stanley vs. Georgia.
The CCG Blog 