OK, here’s the scenario. I come home a little tipsy one night, undress without disturbing my wife and leave my clothes all over the floor. My wife wakes before me, picks up my scattered clothes and starts putting them away neatly. As she’s folding my pants she notices something almost falling out of the pocket. Curious she checks it out. It isn’t important what it is, a letter perhaps, the important thing is that it reveals I am having a torrid affair of long-standing with another woman.
Incandescent with rage my wife divorces me, destroys my career (which happens to depend on a stable marriage, I’m a politician running for office or I’m high up in a really Christian company, or whatever). The upshot is that the discovery of the affair has cost me dearly.
Can I sue my wife or partner for invading my privacy by reading the letter? Do I have an expectation of privacy from my partner once I’m wed? Does marriage give either partner carte-blanche to examine all the other’s secrets? Does a legal marriage make a difference?
IANAL, or even American, but I can imagine the defence lawyer making much of the fact that your wife came across the item by accident.
A further question might be what if your wife had found the item in a locked drawer by using your key, or in a password protected file on your computer. More commonly these days, are text messages confidential at all?
Obviously, you are being silly. And the answer for your particular scenario is no, of course.
Legalities "expectations of privacy" are not simple, but the one you've posted here is. Your ideas about what can be done in response to losing privacy are off a bit as well.
Just a minor quibble, but it was not your partner or SO…it was your legal spouse. IANAL, but it could make a significant difference in your legal standing.
Let’s say that you had put your pants in the laundry bin and that your spouse usually does the laundry. She checks for items in your pockets before putting the clothes in the washer. Invasion of privacy?
I think it’s normal and necessary for your washer woman to empty your pockets before she sends your clothes through the washing machine … if you don’t like what she does with what she finds … get another washer woman …
My mother was adamate … any money found in us kids’ pockets was hers … no arguments allowed …
Expectation, carte blanche, and a legal right of redress for a tort are three very different things. When it comes to the legal part there’s probably a distinction between BF/GF, long term BF/GF, living together SO, common law spouse, and formally married spouse.
Your expectation is whatever you and he/she agree to. Or conveniently forget to discuss. We have threads and threads on peoples’ different expectations ranging from “I feel free to rifle his/her computer and phone at will” to “In 40 years I’ve never looked at any snail- or e-mail addressed to him/her. Nor would I. I wont even look at a book she borrowed from the library.”
I’ll leave it to the lawyers to discuss the law. My bet is once you’re co-habiting as a practical matter you have no tort for invasion of privacy unless you’re taking stringent measures to prevent the invasion. Like keeping your secret shit in an off-premises safe deposit box he/she has never heard about. Sloppy OPSEC on your part, like coming home drunk with evidence in your pocket is real unlikely to be privileged. And therefore real unlikely to be actionable when breached.
This is one of the many reasons it’s always smart to only date people with the same first name as your SO/spouse. That eliminates a lot of opportunity for embarrassing mistakes.
No, of course? LSLGuy’s reply suggest that things may not be as clear-cut as you imagine.
And I wasn’t being ‘silly’, it’s a genune question. By marrying do you give up all rights to privacy or secrecy? The answer in some cases is no, you don’t. If your job has security requirements then obviously your partner has no right to access that information. If you are a doctor, for instance, I should imagine that does not give your partner the right to access any patients’ records you may have. If you’re a lawyer the same applies to client information.
The fact is that if your partner acquires access to your cellphone there is probably a mass of information there that they should not be seeing and that has the potential to damage you. What I am asking is whether they are likely to be held liable a) if they come across the knowledge accidentally and use it against you and b) if they deliberately hack your phone to do the same thing.
It seems clear to me that you must have some expectation of privacy in a relationship. I’m just interested in how much.
I am not a lawyer, but I think there might be liability if you didn’t take reasonable precautions against disclosure of confidential business data. If you’re a doctor, for instance, do you just leave patient charts open at the breakfast table? If you’re dealing with confidential financial data, are you keeping that on the same computer the kids use for their homework? On the other hand, if you do take reasonable precautions (keeping the patient records in your home office and locked up when not being accessed or using a separate computer for work purposes), you might not be liable.
You got this part exactly backwards. If I have privileged info as a consequence of my job I have an obligation to safeguard it.
If somehow my spouse gets ahold of it then *I *have failed in my legal obligation to my employer or patient or client. *They *are the injured party and they can sue or prosecute me.
In some cases, e.g. government classified info, there may be a separate crime of “receiving classified info” that the spouse would be subject to prosecution for.
I would think that the legal doctrine of “clean hands” – you can’t use the legal system to enforce an illegal contract – would apply here.
That torrid affair is likely a violation of adultery laws, if you were legally married. And fornication laws, ff not married. So you are violating state laws, and can’t win a lawsuit against your partner because they found out.
I was surprised to discover there are still adultery laws on the books in some states, but according to this site, there are essentially no laws still standing against fornication.
[QUOTE=laws.com]
…the 2003 Supreme Court decision of Lawrence v. Thomas made all these sodomy laws unconstitutional. Furthermore, it implies that acts between two unrelated adults that are consensual, private, and non-commercial cannot be controlled by law, including any laws against fornication. This is because controlling them by law would hurt the citizen’s right to privacy and liberty.
[/QUOTE]
I would think that if there were a good probability of winning such a lawsuit, Tiger Woods would have had an army of lawyers suing Elin. Since he has an army and probably the means with which to mount a lengthy campaign, and didn’t do so, may be an indicator that the success of such a move would have been fairly low.
I know a woman who was having an affair. Her husband was suspicious, and acquired his “proof” by using a recording device to record phone calls on their phone line. The wife discovered the recording equipment before the husband filed for divorce, and turned the equipment over to the cops.
The husband was breaking the law (in PA) by recording phone conversations this way. He was charged and eventually entered a guilty plea in exchange for no jail time, and paid his fine.
This all happened ten years ago. The couple is still married.
Well, remember that we don’t know the details of their divorce settlement. While I’m sure it was astronomical, he might have been able to shave off a few percentage points based on an assessment of how any counter-charges might have played out in open court.
That may be the reason more generally that there isn’t much examination of this question – that it tends to get folded into an overall lump-sum resolution that closes out both parties’ claims against one another.
You aren’t reading patiently and carefully enough for this level of pique. You presented a VERY SPECIFIC scenario in your thread opener. VERY specific. I responded to that scenario, and I stand by my response. Had you instead opened with the much more general and far-reaching statements that you present only now, I would have said something else.
Yes. It is STILL silly to ask if you can sue your live in main squeeze for tumbling to your infidelity due to your being a slob about it.
Again, “expectation of privacy” in a legal sense, is NOT dependent on each person’s own imagination about it.
