Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2021

Abstract

Historians’ interest in Reich offers a case study of the relationship between historical and legal studies. What can legal scholars learn from historians, and what can historians learn from legal scholarship? This Essay will explore these two questions by focusing on Igo’s The Known Citizen since she encountered Reich not with the dual citizenship of a legal historian but as an intellectual historian. I will first highlight what legal scholars can learn from historians by summarizing the main arguments in The Known Citizen. Then, I will provide an alternative legal account to Igo’s history of privacy, which may clear up some questions that Igo raised but could not answer. Finally, this Essay will conclude with Reich himself as a link between historians, who read him as a primary source, and law professors, who read his work as legal scholarship. Reading Reich as both, I argue, can deepen our understanding of the history of privacy in the twentieth-century United States.

Disciplines

Jurisprudence | Law | Legal Biography | Legal History | Privacy Law

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