Yale University Press has released
The Face That Launched a Thousand Lawsuits: The American Women Who Forged a Right to Privacy (Nov. 2016), by
Jessica Lake (Swinburne University of Technology). A description from the Press:
Drawing on a wealth of original research, Jessica Lake documents how the
advent of photography and cinema drove women—whose images were being
taken and circulated without their consent—to court. There they
championed the creation of new laws and laid the groundwork for
America’s commitment to privacy. Vivid and engagingly written, this
powerful work will draw scholars and students from a range of fields,
including law, women’s history, the history of photography, and cinema
and media studies.
A few blurbs:
"Jessica Lake’s The Face That Launched a Thousand Lawsuits is
one of those rare books that truly upends conventional wisdom and
changes the way readers understand an important subject. In a
fascinating and well written account, Lake retells the history of the
right to privacy. She shows how the activism of individual women played a
central role in driving the legal recognition of that right. This book
persuasively argues that we owe much to women who resisted the
unauthorized circulation of photographic images of them. It is bracing
and compelling from the first page to the last." -- Austin Sarat
"Cybercrimes
of visuality today have a prehistory uncovered in this book, which
shows how far women aggrieved at having their images circulated without
their consent brought the legal cases that built the right to privacy."
--Nancy F. Cott
More information is available
here.
