The quote is from Louis Brandeis, a US Supreme Court Justice, who made the aformentioned statement that “sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants” in a 1913 Harper’s Weekly article, entitled “What Publicity Can Do.” But it was an image that had been in his mind for decades. Twenty years earlier, in a letter to his fiance, Brandeis had expressed an interest in writing a “a sort of companion piece” to his influential article on “The Right to Privacy”, but this time he would focus on “The Duty of Publicity”. He had been thinking, he wrote, “about the wickedness of people shielding wrongdoers & passing them off (or at least allowing them to pass themselves off) as honest men.” 

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