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Humans who are governed by emotional states have the capacity to establish, develop, and retain different interpretations of the people familiar to them. Hence it is the part of the biographer to examine these untethered interpretations and create from them a portrait that will be identifiable from all angles. A biography cannot present a life in the unclear and multi-faceted form that is its familiar and daily form. A biography in this sense is therefore an illusion. This chapter discusses the challenge of shaping biographies. In it, possible flaws of the biographical genre, including the invasion of privacy to the delivery of truths to one's life story, are considered. The chapter also discusses the standard rules governing the biographer's manner of using confidential information or documents. Particular focus is on the ethics of biography, the rights and the wrongs of presentation of those to whom death affords little protection.

The actio iniuriarum became the general remedy for aggressions upon person, dignity, and reputation long before the time of Justinian. This chapter on the development of the action on South African soil uses this hallowed distinction between impairments of reputation (the law of defamation), impairments of dignity (including invasions of privacy, unlawful arrest, and malicious prosecution), and impairments of person. Since, however, in physical injury cases the plaintiff is usually protected by the principles of Aquilian liability (as far as patrimonial loss is concerned) as well as by an action for pain and suffering, the discussion focuses on the first two types of injuries.

Where the claimant is the victim of a tort, exemplary damages may be awarded to punish the defendant for cynically committing a tort. Other remedies are available which are purely restitutionary in effect, notably restitutionary damages and money had and received. The most important question relating to the award of restitutionary remedies for torts is whether they are available regardless of the tort which is committed or whether they are only available in respect of certain torts. If the latter is the case, it is then necessary to identify the criteria which are used to identify those torts for which restitutionary relief is available. This chapter focuses on the so-called doctrine of ‘waiver of tort’ which has been particularly influential in the development of the law in this area. Torts for which restitutionary remedies are available include trespass to land, trespass to goods, conversion, interference with intellectual property rights, nuisance, deceit, and invasion of privacy.

For most people the internet has been a dream come true, allowing instantaneous access to a vast array of information, opinion, and entertainment and facilitating communication with friends and family throughout the world. For others, however, the internet has wrought a nightmare, allowing often anonymous enemies a platform for vicious attacks on the character of their victims and a means for revealing to the world embarrassing private information about them. To combat these attacks, victims and law enforcement officials in the United States have employed both analogue remedies such as harassment and stalking laws as well as cyber-specific provisions. Since the attacks involve speech, however, all these remedies must comport with the First Amendment. The typical response of courts and commentators to the First Amendment issues raised in these cases is to ask whether the perpetrator’s speech falls within one of the limited and narrow traditional exceptions to First Amendment coverage, such as true threats, defamation, obscenity, or fighting words. This approach is understandable in light of unfortunate dicta in several United States Supreme Court decisions—that all content-based restrictions of speech other than speech falling within one of these exceptions are subject to “strict scrutiny,” a rigorous test that few speech restrictions can pass. This chapter argues that this approach to dealing with cyber harassment is misguided. This methodology often results in shoehorning the speech at issue into exceptions into which the speech does not fit, or worse yet, in a finding that the speech is protected by the First Amendment simply because it does not fall within a recognized exception.

In the 1940s, both Hurston and Rawlings sought to construct their selves in different terms based on new “images of their own creation.” Hurston struggled to find a vehicle with which to express herself: her theater aspirations had led nowhere, she had recorded all of her folklore, and had no new ideas for novels after publishers rejected her proposals. According to Robert Hemenway, “In a sense she was written out.” But, she bravely persevered, turning her attention to writing a biography of Herod the Great. Rawlings, too, struggled with the direction of her work, particularly when a former friend sued her for invasion of privacy. The ensuing trial consumed Rawlings' time, psychic energy, and financial resources for five years, and marked a turn away from her original source material—perhaps, because she was fearful of getting sued again and also because her imaginative life had changed. All the dark events in Hurston's and Rawlings' lives, with time, transformed and “[came] out to the light again.” Rawlings' trial was a battle fought for all authors' freedom of expression. Hurston's insistence that she is not “tragically colored” is an ideal to which we Americans have moved closer. Fiercely independent, strong-willed yet tender-hearted, passionate about literature's ability to understand human nature and to stand as a buffer against the evils of the world, Hurston and Rawlings were women ahead of their time. They found solace and solidarity in each other. As Hurston's last letter suggests, they were each other's best inspiration.

On June 8, 1964, Fannie Lou Hamer testified before a board of distinguished panelists at the National Theatre in Washington, D.C. as part of a hearing initiated by the Council of Federated Organizations to expose the volatile climate which the Mississippi-bound Freedom Summer volunteers would soon encounter. This chapter reproduces Hamer’s testimony, in which she recounts her harrowing experience with terror and injustice in Mississippi. The testimony also reflects on larger social problems such as police brutality, segregationist retaliation, and the invasion of privacy that prevented African Americans in the Delta from challenging the blatant imbalance of power in the state. In addition, Hamer offers an account of the injustices that highlight the urgency of federal intervention into Mississippi politics.