Right to Privacy?

Matthew Yglesias proposes:

So why doesn’t someone write up a federal “right to privacy” statute or maybe even a constitutional amendment… The existence (and scope) of a right to privacy in the constitution is a matter of some controversy, and proposing a constitutional privacy amendment might be seen as an admission on the part of privacy advocates that such a right does not exist in the un-amended constitution.

While IANACS (I am not a constitutional scholar), this seems to be covered fairly well by a combination of the ninth amendment and the fourteenth amendment (and probably a bit of the fourth amendment thrown in for good measure).

Rick DeMent in Matthew’s comments explains why the ninth amendment covers this better than I can:

“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”
Now if the right to privacy is not one of these unnamed rights that the people have retained then this amendment has absolutely no meaning. but if that’s true, then the founding fathers just sort of put it in there for shits and giggles…
Frankly for me this is one of the most important amendments in the BoR because it means that I retain all the rights I can think of and the burden is on the government for making a case why something should not be a right. Or to put it another way, any assertion of a right under the constitution is presumed to be protected until it is demonstrated that there is a vested State interest in limiting the right so asserted.

Chris Lawrence shares some interesting history on the ninth amendment.

Radley Balko, while discussing sodomy laws,illustrates, the need for the fourteenth amendment:

So [the framers] included the Ninth Amendment – powers not expressly granted to the federal government elsewhere in the Constitution are reserved for the people. Ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment then forced the states to respect the same individual rights the federal government is required to respect.