Regulating Intimacy : A New Legal Paradigm

Disputes have arisen over questions that apparently set the demands of personal autonomy, justice and responsibility against each other. Can law stay out of the bedroom without shielding oppression and abuse? Can we protect the pursuit of personal happiness while requiring people to behave responsibly towards others? Can regulation acknowledge a variety of intimate relationships without privileging any? Jean Cohen argues that these questions have been impossible to resolve because most legislators, activists and scholars have drawn on an anachronistic conception of privacy, one founded on the idea that privacy involves secrecy and entails a sphere free from legal regulation. In response, Cohen draws on Habermas and other European thinkers to present a robust "constructivist" defence of privacy, one based on the idea that norms and rights are legally constructed.