Is it OK if the newspaper publishes your credit card numbers and passwords, your PINs, and maybe your mothers maiden name so anyone can just “look up” your bank information ?
Or maybe you believe your personal privacy should be secret from the public.
Few people realize California’s Constitution explicitly gives you and me explicit Privacy Rights.
“SECTION 1. All people are by nature free and independent and have Inalienable Rights. Among these are enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring, possessing, and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining safety, happiness, and Privacy.”
Unlike our Federal Constitution where our Rights are duck-taped on (remember they’re called “Amendments”),
California’s Constitution has our Rights on the first page …
in the first paragraph ...
in Article One — Section One !
That gives our rights a real high priority don’t you think ? Because you just can’t get any higher on the list of important Constitutional provisions.
By contrast, the US Constitution has no named Right to Privacy. Thankfully it does provide the Fourth Amendment that gives us a few very narrow privacy rights (e.g. freedom from unreasonable Search and Seizure; freedom from generalized Search Warrants), but no broad general Privacy Right. (Yes I know Justice Scalia agrees with me on this specific point. But keep reading.)
The Federal Constitution also has the Ninth Amendment which acknowledges lots of unspecified rights. However, Supreme Court Justice Scalia rejects any notion that the Ninth Amendment allows us any rights not explicitly spelled out in the US Constitution.
During his confirmation hearings he should have been asked “Can you give us some examples of rights the Ninth Amendment could mean? Follow up would be “Do you mean to assert that the Constitution’s Ninth Amendment is a Legislative Nullity, that it confers no rights at all?”
All Candidates for a Federal Court should get asked “What cases do you believe were wrongly decided?“
In California, elected law-makers never gave us Privacy Rights – we voters had to approve it for ourselves.
All of our California Rights are a lot stronger than Federal Rights, because they are self-executing Rights. That means you can sue someone when they violate your California rights.
That is a sharp contrast to US Rights where Congress has to authorize you to sue when someone or some government agency violates your rights. The Civil Rights laws are some of the few examples where Congress has authorized us to sue when our rights are violated.
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