Few would deny the euphony and eloquence of Justice Douglas’s stirring concluding paragraph in Griswold v. Connecticut. With appropriate disdain for Connecticut’s efforts to justify a law prohibiting married couples from using contraceptives, Douglas led the Supreme Court in striking down this “uncommonly silly law’ as a violation of the constitutional right of privacy.

This constitutional right is, however, mentioned nowhere in the United States Constitution. Justice Douglas found it in the “penumbras” of the Bill of Rights. Justice Goldberg looked to the cryptic words of the ninth amendment to find a marital right of privacy. Justice Harlan, invoking the long- lost doctrine of substantive due process, found the Connecticut statute a violation of fundamental rights implicit in the fourteenth amendment’s due process clause. Finally, Justice White determined that the law was not even rational under the due process clause. As a result, the offensive statute fell before a potpourri of rationales that legal realists might suspect were adjudicative prestidigitation rather than cogent legal analyses.

This Note responds to mounting political and judicial criticism of the Griswold right of privacy by demonstrating that the Court’s seminal decision was consistent with the purpose and development of the Bill of Rights. Moreover, in light of the present Court’s failure to recognize a broad right of sexual autonomy, this Note argues that the constitutional right of privacy provides consenting adults with the right to engage in private consensual sexual activity.