Samuel D. (Samuel Dennis) Warren

author

Samuel D. (Samuel Dennis) Warren

1852–1910

Best remembered as the coauthor of the landmark 1890 essay "The Right to Privacy," he helped shape one of the most enduring ideas in American law. He was also a Boston lawyer and businessman who moved between elite legal circles and his family’s paper-making enterprise.

1 Audiobook

The Right to Privacy

The Right to Privacy

by Louis Dembitz Brandeis, Samuel D. (Samuel Dennis) Warren

About the author

Born in Boston on January 25, 1852, Samuel Dennis Warren II was an American lawyer and businessman. He studied at Harvard, where he became a close classmate of Louis D. Brandeis, and the two later practiced law together in Boston.

Warren is most closely linked to legal history through "The Right to Privacy" (1890), the influential article he published with Brandeis in the Harvard Law Review. The essay became a foundation stone for later privacy law and helped popularize the idea of a personal "right to be let alone."

He also had a business role in the family paper enterprise founded by his father, Samuel Dennis Warren, and managed the S. D. Warren paper mill after his father's death. Warren died on February 18, 1910.