INTRODUCTION
Compared to Methuselahs such as trespass or battery, false light invasion of privacy is a youngster. Yet, unlike other ‘new’ torts, including other privacy torts, it has struggled almost from birth. Indeed, before it turned thirty, it was the target of prominent calls for its rejection. Since then, several prominent state courts have disavowed it. In this Article, we aim to rehabilitate false light’s reputation as a tort in good standing. We do so by casting it in its true light: that is, by identifying more clearly than have others the distinctive injurious wrong it identifies, and why, today, its availability matters.
Part I briefly chronicles the tort’s recognition and standard criticisms of it. Part II advances our central claim, namely, that prominent jurists have mischaracterized false light by treating it either as a reputational injury tort or an emotional-distress tort. Instead, as Melville Nimmer observed more than fifty years ago, it is best seen as a variant on a different privacy tort, namely, public disclosure of private fact. At its core, that tort deems wrongful and injurious the widespread sharing of a person’s private information, where the dissemination of such information would be highly offensive to a reasonable person …
John C Goldberg and Benjamin C Zipursky, A Tort for the Digital Age: False Light Invasion of Privacy Reconsidered, 73 DePaul Law Review 461 (2024).
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