Beyond Personhood and Autonomy: Moral Theory and the Premises of Privacy

This Article constitutes a challenge to the view that the Court's privacy jurisprudence is unprincipled and incoherent. My claim, in contrast, is that the jurisprudence has a core logic. It is a logic based on a series of interlocking premises-a moral principle of perfectionism, a political premise of liberty, an institutional premise of judicial review, and a prudential concern for tradition. One who embraces all of these premises, in the way described, will have a plausible basis for believing that the Court's jurisprudence is morally justified.