The second part reiterates the resulting invitation to consider whether property rights should protect owners from unwanted communications on their land or buildings. It broadens the perspective to a broader range of doctrines other than trespassing and harassment—other areas of property, tort, criminal and constitutional law—and establishes evidence that the law generally prohibits the use for communication purposes of other people`s land or buildings and protects the image or presentation of property produced by the owner. In all cases, the teaching threads support the idea that intentional interference with the interests of these owners is or should be punishable. But the law`s trespassing and harassment restrictions leave no obvious path to relief for affected homeowners. The party concludes by defining the damages associated with the projection as reasonable harm. The term appropriation is used in both property law and privacy law to describe the exploitation of something that belongs to someone else, as well as a loss of control on the part of the owner. Projection cases highlight the link between privacy and property and a paradox in the fact that property does not recognize projections as the basis for a cause of action. Projections harm landowners by reducing the use of property and violating the dignity and privacy of the property owner by turning it into an unintentional billboard. Although the right to privacy is often described by analogy with real estate, the increasingly economic focus of trespassing and harassment laws has strangely left dignity and privacy unprotected when it comes to real property. The approach described in this article is based, in part, on a proven method of recognizing the abyss of a change in tort law. In 1890, Samuel Warren and future Justice Louis Brandeis were the authors of the right to privacy by assembling from a mass of doctrines of tort, contractual and patrimonial liability an immature interest worthy of independent protection.19×19. Samuel D. Warren & Louis D.
Brandeis, The Right to Privacy, 4 Harv. 193 (1890). In fact, they presented themselves as part of a much longer evolutionary history of tort law, explaining the growth of trespassing to more modern acts of dishonesty involving unfair competition resulting from economic, social, and technological pressures.20×20. Id. 193-95. The authors explained that technological and social changes have highlighted this interest in privacy: trends in photography, recording equipment and newspaper commerce have led them to examine «whether the existing law offers a principle that can legitimately be invoked. the individual», a question to which they answered in the affirmative.21×21. Id., p. 197; See ID.
195–97. In the late 1930s, jurists like Professor William Prosser gathered evidence that the courts were on the verge of recognizing a lawsuit for intentionally inflicting emotional distress, despite protests to the contrary and «tense» efforts to bring these claims into the realm of property claims or other tort claims.22×22. William L. Prosser, Intentional Infliction of Mental Suffering: A New Offense, 874, 874, 880 (1939); see Fowler v. Harper & Mary Coate McNeely, A Re-examination of the Basis for Liability for Emotional Distress, 1938 Wis. L. Rev. 426, 429; Calvert Magruder, Mental and Emotional Disturbance in the Law of Torts, 49 Harv. 1033, 1067 (1936); Prosser, op.
cit. cit., p. 874. This change occurred at the same time that even legal scholars began to take note of advances in scientific understanding of the relationship between psychological distress and behavioural and physical consequences.23×23. Herbert F. Goodrich, Emotional Disturbance as Legal Damage, 20 Mich. L. 497, 500–01 (1922). In both cases, courts and lawmakers finally responded to the call to recognize the harms and interests that scientists had pursued in response to new pressures. This article goes in a similar direction: it examines the development that led to this point, treats new problems as a call to seek deeper principles, and uses these principles to dictate how the law should change to solve the underlying problems. So far, light protests on private property have taken place mainly on the side of commercial buildings.14×14.
This article is limited to examining projections on private rather than public property. Projections on public property undoubtedly take place, see, for example, John Walsh, Activists Projected the Phrase, «Kavanaugh Is a Sexual Predator» on a courthouse building in Washington, bus. Insider (26 September 2018, 02:39), www.businessinsider.com/activists-projected-kavanaugh-is-a-sexual-predator-onto-washington-courthouse-2018-9 [perma.cc/3KM3-2XS3], but they raise various questions, such as how to categorize government facades under the Public Forum doctrine and how to assess the appropriateness of restrictions on time, place or type of screenings, see Cornelius v. NAACP Legal Def. & Educ. Fund, Inc., 473 U.S. 788, 806 (1985); Ass`n v. Perry Local Educators` Ass`n, 460 U.S.
37, 45–48 (1983); Lehman v. City of Shaker Heights, 418 U.S. 298, 303–04 (1974) (majority opinion). Despite this distinction, the government, as the owner, has property rights that support traditional criminal acts of trespassing and harassment. See City of Providence v. Doe, 21 A.3d 315, 320 (R.I. 2011). While some of the interests described in this article resemble personality, others are more property-based, so the knowledge gained can prove useful when analyzing projection constraints in this context. The debate about why we extend certain tort protections to governments relative to the individuals they normally protect is rich, and an excellent more recent treatment is Paul B. Miller & Jeffrey A. Pojanowski, Torts Against the State, in Civil Wrongs and Justice in Private Law (Paul B. Miller & John F.K.
Oberdiek eds., to be published in 2020) (deposited with the Harvard Law School Library).