Samantha Barbas, SUNY Buffalo Law School, has published The Social Origins of the Personality Torts, at 67 Rutgers Law Review 393 (2015). Here is the abstract.

In the late 1800s the law became increasingly involved in the management and protection of people’s feelings, reputations, and social relations. Courts created a new body of law in this area, recognizing new torts of “invasion of privacy” and intentional infliction of emotional distress, and expanding the law of libel. This Article argues that the emergence of these torts can be seen as a response to a social reorientation taking place between roughly 1880 and 1910—a change in the way people constructed their social identities and were known to one another.

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