Law and Privacy

As has been previously discussed, Rule of Law is formally antithetical to Individualism, though the content of a law can defend and promote it.  It is also often regarded as hostile to Privacy, which only sometimes reduces to Individualism.  For, in many cases, such opacity entails a multiplicity, agreement amongst which first produces it, e. g. sexual relations.  The claim to the privileged status of agreement is one of fundamental grounds for Economic de-regulation, based on the analysis that a Free-Market system is constituted by a network of private arrangements.  However, granting such an opacity, it is not extended to activity that exceeds the agreement, e. g. when a third-party is affected by such activity.  But, perhaps the biggest challenge to such a claim is that agreement entails voluntariness, and it is often difficult to determine if consent is truly voluntary, e. g. someone under duress.  That difficulty is a central factor in American life, even if business-as-usual tends to obscure it.  In the absence of attention to that indeterminacy, Law remains widely conceived as a threat to Privacy.