Loud sex is now as good as a warrant.
Believe it or not, the Superior Court of New Jersey recently ruled that high-volume sex is cause enough for police to search a home. It is just the latest move in the battle over privacy in the United States. The walls of solitude just got a little thinner, especially for those with thin-walled homes.
The right to privacy has been the subject of vigorous debate in the United States for over one hundred years. Lately it’s escalated: in only a decade, from the pre-9/11 halcyon days to today, we have gone from hugging our loved ones goodbye at their airplane gate (Love, Actually–style) to needing a boarding pass to get through security—not to mention the willingness to remove various items of clothing, or even submit to a scan that sees straight through our clothes.
Yes, things have changed. But even a century ago, Americans were feeling the intrusion.
The U.S. Constitution and a handful of Supreme Court cases establish some privacy-like protections, but no law establishes any firm “right to be let alone.” That’s what Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, two Harvard-educated lawyers, called it in an 1890 paper published in the Harvard Law Review. In the history of the issue of privacy in the United States, it is a seminal bit of legal scholarship.
At Harvard Law School, Warren and Brandeis had been a promising pair: Warren graduated number two in his class in 1877, second only to Brandeis, who set a record for highest GPA upon graduation. (Brandeis would one day become a Supreme Court justice.) Thirteen years later, they cowrote “The Right to Privacy,” in the process carving a new groove in legal philosophy. The paper set out the principle of privacy and made the argument that it is worth legally preserving.
