"The power of general rights analysis can be focused and harnessed to serve our present inquiry. Privacy claims qualify as rights under the Interest Theory if interests in privacy can be delimited with sufficient clarity and precision to give them a similar structure to an interest in negative liberty. Privacy rights must not, on the other hand, assume the structure of an intolerably burdensome right to autonomy. In fact, this condition is quite easily satisfied to the extent that privacy interests converge with negative liberty on a shared core idea of being left alone, free from unwarranted interference.31 It is no great imposition on your autonomy to be told to leave me alone, while at the same time you, in your turn, benefit from being left alone by me and everybody else to get on with your life. Essentially the same considerations explain the criminal law's preference for operating primarily through negative prohibitions (“don't do x, y or z, but you are free to do everything else”), and its general aversion to omissions liability."
January 1, 1970