What "Privacy" Really Means

Findlaw columnist Michael Dorf today writes about a recent decision of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals upholding a lower court's quashing of a subpoena for medical records related to the partial-birth abortion debate. As Dorf points out, not only is the ruling itself important, but so is one of the rationales developed to support it by Judge Richard Posner. Posner basically argues that the patients in these cases have a privacy right to not have their medical info disclosed even if all personal information is blacked out and is circulated only among the parties to the suit and the courts involved.