Abstract

The dissertation is an examination of the philosophical concept of privacy. It begins with an exposition of the evolution of the concept of privacy from ancient Greece to the present. It includes an evaluation of the extant scholarship on privacy in philosophy which I criticize as inadequate to explain privacy's value to us. I suggest an alternative model of privacy which completes and unites relevant prior theories. Focus is then shifted from philosophy to law. For background, I include a summary exposition of the concept of privacy as a right in both jurisprudential literature and in case law. I argue that a principle of privacy law needs to be articulated in order to attain coherence and consistent adjudication of claims to privacy in courts of law. To this end, I test my theory of privacy by applying it to a 1986 Supreme Court case, Bowers v. Hardwick, in order to show the superiority of my model