126: How Anne Boleyn gave us our right to privacy

DecodeDC

Today Americans view privacy as a fundamental civil liberty, a right that puts a boundary on what the government can do. Our ‘right to privacy’ has become part of the essential contract Americans make with their government, a system that protects individuals from the government’s ability to intrude into the private sphere. But it wasn’t so long ago that the very idea of a right to privacy, even of a right to one’s own thoughts, wasn’t such a foregone conclusion. This week on the podcast, we take you through a history of the right to privacy, where we got our ideas about privacy - specifically personal privacy - and then how that right to privacy has been applied in famous Supreme Court Cases like Griswold v. Connecticut and Roe v. Wade.