Randall P. Bezanson

The Right to Privacy Revisited: Privacy, News, and Social Change, 1890-1990

In 1890, Warren and Brandeis published their extraordinarily influential article The Right to Privacy, which conceptualized privacy as a right to be free from the prying eyes and ears of others. In this Article, Dean Bezanson assesses the modern currency of the privacy right concept as developed by Warren and Brandeis. He argues that the boundaries on privacy described in The Right to Privacy were a response to the encroachment of urbanization on rural values and institutions and an attempt to develop communicative norms from contemporary but threatened social conventions. The author compares the social conditions of today with those of the late nineteenth century, exploring changes in the meaning of news and in the technologies of communication. He concludes that circumstances have changed so dramatically that the rationale for the right to privacy must change as well. No longer can privacy be envisioned as a set of social conventions imposed on discourse. Social attitudes are too diverse and decentralized, and the emphasis on individualism too great, to argue for any one set of social norms about communication. Accordingly, the author contends that privacy should be premised on the individuals control of information. This approach suggests that the legal emphasis on controls over publication be shifted to a duty of confidentiality imposed on

Taxes on Knowledge in America: Exactions on the Press from Colonial Times to the Present

In Taxes on Knowledge in America, Randall P. Bezanson explores the extent to which the publication and distribution of current public information is effected by economic exactions. The book begins with a brief overview of the English history and experience with knowledge taxes, before turning to a discussion of knowledge taxes in America from colonial times to the present. In addition to covering traditional printed publications, Bezanson looks at recent developments in broadcast and cable telecommunications, devotes a chapter to the history of the postal system, and gleans insight from three benchmark Supreme Court decisions. Bezanson provocatively concludes that knowledge is common property and knowledge taxes should be measured by their impact on the diversity of ideas and availability of information throughout society.

The atomization of the newspaper: Technology, economics and the coming transformation of editorial judgments about news

Journalism and editorial judgment concerning news rest, fundamentally, on a writers and editors independence from the owner of a newspaper and from its audience in making judgments about news, since such judgments consist in part of decisions about what people need to know, not simply what people want to know. This article argues that the focus of journalism has too long been fixed on separating the editor from the will of the owner. With dramatic changes since mid‐century in the economies of scale in the newspaper business, with rapid changes in the technology of information acquisition and distribution and with increasing fragmentation of audiences and markets, todays paradigm should not be the power of owners over content, but the reverse: the excessive power of audiences over the content of what they read. Journalisms task, then, is to establish mechanisms for separating the writer and editor from the audience and its surrogate, the advertiser, lest editorial judgment be eroded from the bottom up—...

Solomon Would Weep: A Comment on In the Matter of Baby M and the Limits of Judicial Authority

In commenting on the New Jersey Supreme Court’s decision in the Baby M case, I will focus on the rcsult of the court’s decision and what it implies about the limits of judicial power, not on the court’s opinion. The reason is that, excepting the court’s basic premises, 1 can find little in the opinion to criticize. My difficulty, instead, is with the premises from which the court approached the case, and what they imply about the capacity of courts to construct legal doctrine on the basis of largely, if not wholly, unexplored social and cultural values. The result reached in the Baby M caw-that Mr. Stem is Baby M’s legal father and Ms. Whitehead her legal mother-is, in my judgment, surely the worst result possible. That it was indisputably t e logical, reasoned, and straight-