Abstract
[Excerpt] This article occupies the space between the ongoing, newly energized development of state constitutional law and the fraught public policy field of privacy protections. It analyzes a new state constitutional provision that is explicitly and exclusively about information privacy. The provision, Part I, Article 2b9 of the New Hampshire Constitution,10 reads as follows: An individual’s right to live free from governmental intrusion in private or personal information is natural, essential, and inherent.11 The provision extends an individual’s privacy right significantly beyond that of both the federal and New Hampshire state constitutions. It operates at the intersection of privacy and of 21st century technology, state and federal constitutional law and jurisprudence, as well as state and federal laws and regulations. Historically, the mix of law addressing this challenging intersection was primarily a patchwork quilt that tended to favor technology over privacy. Article 2b is a model for prioritizing privacy in this digital age. As its history reflects, it is both a 21st century “ordinance of the people” and “a dynamic set of substantive instructions and limitations on government that is adopted and jealously maintained by the people themselves.”12 Analysis of that ordinance of the people is the goal of this article. While Article 2b was enacted in 2018, four years before Dobbs, it is all the more relevant in a post-Dobbs world when lawyers and the public will increasingly turn to state constitutions to protect themselves from the prying eye of government, or the even more invasive eye of Big Tech.
Department
law
Publication Date
2025
Journal Title
Syracuse Law Review
Publisher
Syracuse University College of Law
Document Type
Article
Recommended Citation
Albert Scherr, A New State Constitutional Right to Information Privacy: The Origins Speak, 75 SYRACUSE L. REV. 837 (2025).