The Face That Launched a Thousand Lawsuits

Jessica Lake has written a persuasive, often-intriguing account of the gendered nature of privacy law. When Louis D. Brandeis and Samuel D. Warren suggested the creation of a right to privacy in 1890 (“The Right to Privacy,” Harvard Law Review, Dec. 1890, pp. 193–220), they objected to the new—intrusions by photographers—and drew on the old—established legal doctrines such as “copyright, contract, and breach of confidence” (p. 8). Abigail Roberson's well-known lawsuit of 1900 failed to stop her face from being plastered on flour advertisements, but it prompted the first right-to-privacy statute. Lake demonstrates that privacy litigants were overwhelmingly female. In her first chapter, she shifts the focus from photo and film creators and audiences to their often-unhappy subjects, including young women “shot” by male Kodak “fiends” in the 1880s (p. 33). She then explores Roberson's case and earlier efforts, women who objected to medical snooping and to newsreels that recorded their images; then entertainers who claimed the right to (control over) publicity; and finally films that adapted life stories. While photo and film studies offer theories on why people found their recorded images so disturbing (and strained metaphors—photography is “an invisible umbilicus joining image and referent”), lawyers and judges of the time borrowed from their own field (p. 20). Men had access to the “language of liberty and freedom” (p. 14), while women “forging a right to privacy” were the “New Woman” who “rejected traditional gender roles” (pp. 10, 11

Face (sociological concept · Human rights · Lawsuit · Political science · Publicity · Right to privacy · Sociology · Statute · The Right to Privacy · American History and Culture · Canadian Identity and History · Law · Photography and Visual Culture