The right to privacy is an element of various legal traditions to restrain governmental and private actions that threaten the privacy of individuals. Over 150 national constitutions mention the right to privacy.

In the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 12, the United Nations states:

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honor and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Intrusion on Seclusion

Intrusion on seclusion is one of the four privacy torts created under U.S. common law. Intrusion on seclusion is commonly thought to be the bread-and-butter claim for an "invasion of privacy."

The other three privacy claims under U.S. tort law are:

• public disclosure of private facts,

• false light, and

• appropriation of someone's name or likeness.

Elements.

The elements of an intrusion on seclusion claim in tort law are:

• intentionally

• intruding

• on the solitude or seclusion of another person, or on their private affairs

• in a manner that would be highly offensive to a reasonable person.

In US law, false light is a tort concerning privacy that is similar to the tort of defamation. The privacy laws in the United States include a non-public person's right to protection from publicity which puts the person in a false light to the public. That right is balanced against the First Amendment right of free speech.

False light differs from defamation primarily in being intended "to protect the plaintiff's mental or emotional well-being", rather than to protect a plaintiff's reputation as is the case with the tort of defamation and in being about the impression created rather than being about veracity. If a publication of information is false, then a tort of defamation might have occurred. If that communication is not technically false but is still misleading, then a tort of false light might have occurred.

False light privacy claims often arise under the same facts as defamation cases, and therefore not all states recognize false light actions. There is a subtle difference in the way courts view the legal theories—false light cases are about damage to a person's personal feelings or dignity, whereas defamation is about damage to a person's reputation.

The specific elements of the tort of false light vary considerably, even among those jurisdictions which do recognize this Tort. Generally, these elements consist of the following:

1. A publication by the defendant about the plaintiff;

2. made with actual malice (very similar to that type required by New York Times v Sullivan in "Defamation" cases);

3. which places the Plaintiff in a false light; AND

4. that would be highly offensive (i.e., embarrassing to reasonable persons).

Robbery is the crime of taking or attempting to take anything of value by force, threat of force, or by putting the victim in fear. According to common law, robbery is defined as taking the property of another, with the intent to permanently deprive the person of that property, by means of force or fear; that is, it is a larceny or theft accomplished by an assault. Precise definitions of the offence may vary between jurisdictions. Robbery is differentiated from other forms of theft (such as burglary, shoplifting, pickpocketing, or car theft) by its inherently violent nature (a violent crime); whereas many lesser forms of theft are punished as misdemeanors, robbery is always a felony in jurisdictions that distinguish between the two. Under English law, most forms of theft are triable either way, whereas robbery is triable only on indictment. The word "rob" came via French from Late Latin words (for example, deraubare) of Germanic origin, from Common Germanic raub "theft".

Among the types of robbery are armed robbery, which involves the use of a weapon, and aggravated robbery, when someone brings with them a deadly weapon or something that appears to be a deadly weapon. Highway robbery or mugging takes place outside or in a public place such as a sidewalk, street, or parking lot. Carjacking is the act of stealing a car from a victim by force. Extortion is the threat to do something illegal, or the offer to not do something illegal, in the event that goods are not given, primarily using words instead of actions.

Criminal slang for robbery includes "blagging" (armed robbery, usually of a bank) or "stick-up" (derived from the verbal command to robbery targets to raise their hands in the air), and "steaming" (organized robbery on underground train systems).

The parol evidence rule is a rule in the Anglo-American common law that governs what kinds of evidence parties to a contract dispute can introduce when trying to determine the specific terms of a contract. The rule also prevents parties who have reduced their agreement to a final written document from later introducing other evidence, such as the content of oral discussions from earlier in the negotiation process, as evidence of a different intent as to the terms of the contract. The rule provides that "extrinsic evidence is inadmissible to vary a written contract". The term "parol" derives from the Anglo-Norman French p a r o l or p a r  o l e, meaning "word of mouth" or "verbal", and in medieval times referred to oral pleadings in a court case.

The rule's origins lie in English contract law, but has been adopted in other common law jurisdictions; however there are now some differences between application of the rule in different jurisdictions. For instance, in the US, a common misconception is that it is a rule of evidence (like the Federal Rules of Evidence), but that is not the case; whereas in England it is indeed a rule of evidence.

The supporting rationale for this is that since the contracting parties have reduced their agreement to a single and final writing, extrinsic evidence of past agreements or terms should not be considered when interpreting that writing, as the parties had decided to ultimately leave them out of the contract. In other words, one may not use evidence made prior to the written contract to contradict the writing.

Treasure trove is an amount of money or coin, gold, silver, plate, or bullion found hidden underground or in places such as cellars or attics, where the treasure seems old enough for it to be presumed that the true owner is dead and the heirs undiscoverable. An archaeological find of treasure trove is known as a hoard. The legal definition of what constitutes treasure trove and its treatment under law vary considerably from country to country, and from era to era.

The term is also often used metaphorically. Collections of articles published as a book are often titled Treasure Trove, as in A Treasure Trove of Science. This was especially fashionable for titles of children's books in the early- and mid-20th century.

Terminology.

Treasure trove, sometimes rendered treasure-trove, literally means "treasure that has been found". The English term treasure trove was derived from tresor trové, the Anglo-French equivalent of the Latin legal term thesaurus inventus. In 15th-century English the Anglo-French term was translated as "treasure found", but from the 16th century it began appearing in its modern form with the French word trové anglicized as trovey, trouve or trove. The term wealth deposit has been proposed as a more accurate alternative.

The term treasure trove is often used metaphorically to mean a "valuable find", and hence a source of treasure, or a reserve or repository of valuable things. Trove is often used alone to refer to the concept, the word having been reanalysed as a noun via folk etymology from an original Anglo-French adjective trové (cognate to the French past participle trouvé, literally "found"). Treasure trove is therefore akin to similar Anglo-French or Anglo-French-derived legal terms whereby a post-positive adjective in a noun phrase (contrary to standard English syntax) has been reanalysed as a compound noun phrase, as in court martial, force majeure, and Princess Royal. Phrases of this form are often used either with the etymologically correct plural form (for example, "Courts-martial deal with serious offences ...") or as fully rederived plural forms (such as "... ordering court-martials ..."). In the case of treasure trove, the typical plural form is almost always treasure troves, with treasures trove found mostly in historical or literary works.

A copyright troll is a party (person or company) that enforces copyrights it owns for purposes of making money through litigation, in a manner considered unduly aggressive or opportunistic, generally without producing or licensing the works it owns for paid distribution. Critics object to the activity because they believe it does not encourage the production of creative works, but instead makes money through the inequities and unintended consequences of high statutory damages provisions in copyright laws intended to encourage creation of such works. 

Both the term and the concept of a copyright troll began to appear in the mid-2000s. It derives from the pejorative "patent trolls", which are companies that enforce patent rights to earn money from companies that are selling products, without having products of their own for sale. It is distinguished from organizations such as ASCAP, which collect royalties and enforce copyrights of their members. 

Limitations and exceptions to copyright are provisions, in local copyright law or Berne Convention, which allow for copyrighted works to be used without a license from the copyright owner.

Limitations and exceptions to copyright relate to a number of important considerations such as market failure, freedom of speech, education and equality of access (such as by the visually impaired). Some view limitations and exceptions as "user rights"—seeing user rights as providing an essential balance to the rights of the copyright owners. There is no consensus among copyright experts as to whether user rights are rights or simply limitations on copyright. See for example the National Research Council's Digital Agenda Report, note 1. The concept of user rights has also been recognized by courts, including the Canadian Supreme Court in CCH Canadian Ltd v. Law Society of Upper Canada (2004), which classed "fair dealing" as such a user right. These kinds of disagreements in philosophy are quite common in the philosophy of copyright, where debates about jurisprudential reasoning tend to act as proxies for more substantial disagreements about good policy.

The idea–expression distinction or idea–expression dichotomy is a legal doctrine in the United States that limits the scope of copyright protection by differentiating an idea from the expression or manifestation of that idea. 

Unlike patents, which may confer proprietary rights in relation to general ideas and concepts per se when construed as methods, copyrights cannot confer such rights. An adventure novel provides an illustration of the concept. Copyright may subsist in the work as a whole, in the particular story or characters involved, or in any artwork contained in the book, but generally not in the idea or genre of the story. Copyright, therefore, may not subsist in the idea of a man venturing out on a quest, but may subsist in a particular story that follows that pattern. Similarly, if the methods or processes described in a work are patentable, they may be the subject of various patent claims, which may or may not be broad enough to cover other methods or processes based on the same idea. Arthur C. Clarke, for example, sufficiently described the concept of a communications satellite (a geostationary satellite used as a telecommunications relay) in a 1945 paper that it was not considered patentable in 1954 when it was developed at Bell Labs. 

Negligent entrustment is a cause of action in tort law that arises where one party (the entrustor) is held liable for negligence because they negligently provided another party (the entrustee) with a dangerous instrumentality, and the entrusted party caused injury to a third party with that instrumentality. The cause of action most frequently arises where one person allows another to drive their automobile.

Quasi-tort is a legal term that is sometimes used to describe unusual tort actions, on the basis of a legal doctrine that some legal duty exists which cannot be classified strictly as negligence in a personal duty resulting in a tort nor as a contractual duty resulting in a breach of contract, but rather some other kind of duty recognizable by the law. It has been used, for example, to describe a tort for strict liability arising out of product liability, although this is typically simply called a 'tort'.

Although it is not to be found in most legal dictionaries, it has been used by some scholars such as Sri Lankan Lakshman Marasinghe. Lakshman proposes that the doctrine provides legal relief that falls outside tort or contract, but with some of the characteristics of tort or contract, as can be found in restitution (including unjust enrichment), equity (including unconscionable conduct), beneficiaries under a trust of the benefit of a promise, people protected by the valid assignment of promise, fiduciary duty, and contracts of insurance.

An ultrahazardous activity in the common law of torts is one that is so inherently dangerous that a person engaged in such an activity can be held strictly liable for injuries caused to another person, even if the person engaged in the activity took every reasonable precaution to prevent others from being injured. In the Restatement of the Law 2d, Torts 2d, the term has been abandoned in favor of the phrase "inherently dangerous activity."

The right to privacy is an element of various legal traditions to restrain governmental and private actions that threaten the privacy of individuals. Over 150 national constitutions mention the right to privacy.

In the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 12, the United Nations states:

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

History.

The concept of a human "right to privacy" begins when the Latin word "ius" expanded from meaning "what is fair" to include "a right - an entitlement a person possesses to control or claim something," by the Decretum Gratiani in Bologna, Italy in the 12th Century. 

In the United States, an article in the December 15, 1890 issue of the Harvard Law Review, written by attorney Samuel D. Warren and future U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Louis Brandeis, entitled "The Right to Privacy", is often cited as the first explicit finding of a U.S. right to privacy. Warren and Brandeis wrote that privacy is the "right to be let alone", and focused on protecting individuals. This approach was a response to recent technological developments of the time, such as photography and sensationalist journalism, also known as "yellow journalism".

Privacy rights are inherently intertwined with information technology. In his widely cited dissenting opinion in Olmstead v United States (1928), Brandeis relied on thoughts he developed in his 1890 article The Right to Privacy.  In that dissent, he urged that personal privacy matters were more relevant to constitutional law, going so far as to say that "the government was identified as a potential privacy invader." He writes, "Discovery and invention have made it possible for the Government, by means far more effective than stretching upon the rack, to obtain disclosure in court of what is whispered in the closet." At that time, telephones were often community assets, with shared party lines and potentially eavesdropping switchboard operators. By the time of Katz, in 1967, telephones had become personal devices with lines not shared across homes and switching was electro-mechanical. In the 1970s, new computing and recording technologies raised more concerns about privacy, resulting in the Fair Information Practice Principles.

In recent years there have been few attempts to clearly and precisely define the "right to privacy".

The statute of frauds refers to the requirement that certain kinds of contracts be memorialized in writing, signed by the party to be charged, with sufficient content to evidence the contract.

Terminology.

The term statute of frauds comes from an Act of the Parliament of England passed in 1677 (authored by Lord Nottingham assisted by Sir Matthew Hale, Sir Francis North and Sir Leoline Jenkins. and passed by the Cavalier Parliament), the title of which is An Act for Prevention of Frauds and Perjuries. Many common law jurisdictions have made similar statutory provisions, while a number of civil law jurisdictions have equivalent legislation incorporated into their civil codes. The original English statute itself may still be in effect in a number of Canadian provinces, depending on the constitutional or reception statute of English law, and any subsequent legislative developments.

Application.

The statute of frauds typically requires a signed writing in the following circumstances:

Contracts in consideration of marriage. This provision covers prenuptial agreements.

Contracts that cannot be performed within one year. However, contracts of indefinite duration do not fall under the statute of frauds regardless of how long the performance actually takes.

Contracts for the transfer of an interest in land. This applies not only to a contract to sell land but also to any other contract in which land or an interest in it is disposed, such as the grant of a mortgage or an easement.

Contracts by the executor of a will to pay a debt of the estate with his own money.

Contracts for the sale of goods totaling $500.00 or more.

Contracts in which one party becomes a surety (acts as guarantor) for another party's debt or other obligation.

In an action for specific performance of a contract to convey land, the agreement must be in writing to satisfy the statute of frauds. The statute is satisfied if the contract to convey is evidenced by a writing or writings containing the essential terms of a purchase and sale agreement and signed by the party against whom the contract is to be enforced. If there is no written agreement, a court of equity can specifically enforce an oral agreement to convey only if the part performance doctrine is satisfied. In most jurisdictions, part performance is proven when the purchaser pays the purchase price, has possession of the land and makes improvements on the land, all with the permission of the seller. No jurisdiction is satisfied by payment of the purchase price alone.

Under common law, the statute of frauds also applies to contract modifications. For example, in an oral agreement for the lease of a car for nine months, immediately after taking possession, the lessor then decides that he really likes the car and makes an oral offer to the lessee to extend the term of the lease by an additional six months. Although neither agreement alone comes under the statute of frauds, the oral extension modifies the original contract to make it a fifteen-month lease (nine months plus the additional six), thereby bringing it under the statute as the contract now exceeds twelve months in duration. In theory, the same principle works in reverse as well, such that an agreement to reduce a lease from fifteen months to nine months would not require a writing. However, many jurisdictions have enacted statutes that require a writing for such situations.

Lost, mislaid, and abandoned property are categories of the common law of property which deals with personal property or chattel which has left the possession of its rightful owner without having directly entered the possession of another person. Property can be considered lost, mislaid or abandoned depending on the circumstances under which it is found by the next party who obtains its possession.

There is an old saying that possession is nine-tenths of the law, perhaps dating back centuries. This means that in most cases, the possessor of a piece of property is its rightful owner without evidence to the contrary. More colloquially, this may be called finders keepers. The contradiction to this principle is theft by finding, which may occur if conversion occurs after finding someone else's property.

The rights of a finder of such property are determined in part by the status in which it is found. Because these classifications have developed under the common law of England, they turn on nuanced distinctions. The general rule attaching to the three types of property may be summarized as: A finder of property acquires no rights in mislaid property, is entitled to possession of lost property against everyone except the true owner, and is entitled to keep abandoned property. This rule varies by jurisdiction.

Moral rights.

Moral rights are rights of creators of copyrighted works that are generally recognized in civil law jurisdictions and, to a lesser extent, in some common law jurisdictions. They include the right of attribution and the right to the integrity of the work, which bars the work from alteration, distortion, or mutilation without the author's permission. Paraphrasing without permission may be seen as violating moral rights. Moral rights are distinct from any economic rights tied to copyrights. Even if the author has assigned their copyright to a third party, they still maintain the moral rights to the work. Moral rights were first recognized in France and Germany. They were included in the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works in 1928. While the United States became a signatory to the Berne convention in 1989, it does not completely recognize moral rights as part of copyright law, which is seen as protecting commercial rights in intellectual property, but as part of other bodies of law such as defamation or unfair competition which protect the reputation of the author.

Edward Gibbon published the last three volumes of his masterpiece The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in 1788, at a time when both copyright and moral rights were poorly enforced. With a small private income, he was not dependent on sales but was more concerned about the damage to his reputation from poor translations, a form of paraphrasing. He wrote, "The French, Italian and German translations have been executed with various success; but instead of patronizing, I should willingly suppress such imperfect copies which injure the character while they propagate the name of the author. The Irish pirates are at once my friends and my enemies...."

By the start of the twentieth century, U.S. decisions on unfair competition found that representing as the author's work a version of the work that substantially departed from the original was a cause of action. Section §43(a) of the Lanham Act, which protects brands and trademarks, also provides similar protection to laws based on moral rights. For any goods or services, it bans false designation of origin or a false description or representation. In Gilliam v American Broadcasting the British comedy group called Monty Python took action against the ABC network for broadcasting versions of their programs which had been correctly attributed to them but had been extensively edited, in part to remove content that their audience might consider offensive or obscene. The judgement of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit was in favor of Monty Python, finding the cuts might be an "actionable mutilation" that violated the Lanham Act.