Legal Privilege

A slow pitch on a Monday morning.

Because it's considered to be very important for people to be able to get good legal and medical advise, and they can't get that good advise if they can't be fully honest with their advisor for fear of legal repercussions. Encouraging people to keep diaries isn't considered a major public priority.

I agree with Ben that this is the reasoning behind it, but I don't think it should be this way. I think that someone should have a 4th and 5th Amendment protection against that (since this would be both an unreasonable invasion of privacy and giving testimony against one's self).

If people want a public policy protecting diaries, then they can certainly have it. But remember: Law is complicated.

For example, how do we distinguish protected diaries from other unprotected writings? Would the law extend to, say, scrapbooks and photo albums, or would it cover only the subject's personal prose? Does the privilege turn on whether the author turns at the time of writing that no one will read it until after his death, or some number of years into the future?

Suppose that a drug dealer keeps a set of business books, that is, records about his various deals and relationships with suppliers and purchasers. It's his own original prose, and a record of the day-to-day events of his life. He wrote it with a historical purpose in mind: He wanted to be able to look back and remember who owed him how much money. So do you want to exclude from evidence at his trial the drug dealer's business journal? If not, how will you conceptually distinguish it from the types of diaries that you want to exclude?

Edit: Second para, last sentence should read: "Does the privilege turn on whether the author intends at the time of writing that no one will read it until after his death, or some number of years into the future?"