The Poverty of Privacy Rights. By Khiara M. Bridges. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017.

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12405
• Date: 01 June 2019
• Published date: 01 June 2019

The Poverty of Privacy Rights. By Khiara M. Bridges. Stanford,

CA: Stanford University Press, 2017.

Reviewed by Heidi Affi and Patrick Schmidt, Department of Political

Science, Macalester College

Inequality is on the global agenda, marking the contemporary era

with heightened concerns about deprivation and alienation. But

for poor mothers in the United States, Khiara Bridges powerfully

observes in The Poverty of Privacy Rights, none of this is new.

American law and culture has long marginalized mothers who live

in poverty, stripping them of their privacy, their dignity, and even

their children. For those who had not known this, after reading

Bridges’ rich account, it can scarcely be forgotten.

Bridges acknowledges that readers might find in her book

ample evidence of a moderate claim, one very comfortable to

scholars of law and society: that poor mothers’ privacy rights are

ineffective. For women dependent on state aid and subjected to

pervasive policing by both criminal and child welfare systems, pri-

vacy rights are unable to counterbalance the presumptions made

about their liberty and their adequacy as parents. Bridges wants

readers to accept a stronger claim, however: that poor mothers do

not possess privacy rights. The key is society’s moral construction of

poverty, which assumes that poor people are behaviorally and

morally deficient. For poor mothers in a society that cherishes

motherhood as a public good, their perceived, frequently racial-

ized deficiencies inevitably affect their children and justify law’s

harsh treatment. The mistrust of poor mothers is so unshakeable

that “their inability to shield themselves from regulation is ... their

existential condition” (84), not merely the result of a bargain with

the government for benefits. Bridges poses her strong claim as “a

challenge: ... to think about why we have been seduced by a nar-

rative about equal rights when everyday, lived reality suggest that

nothing could be further from the truth” (29).

A scholar of both law and anthropology, Bridges employs a

mix of approaches. She first introduces her claims against the

backdrop of the classic philosophical accounts of legal rights,

before examining the cultural discourse of the deserving and

undeserving poor (Chapter 1). One effect of this narrative

emerges in an examination of the “unconstitutional conditions

doctrine,” the jurisprudence governing when the state’s require-

ments on the receipt of benefits may burden other rights

(Chapter 2). The pattern, Bridges shows, is unmistakable:

whereas the Court has found values worth protecting when it has

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