The general legal approach is that dead people have no privacy rights, and their privacy tends to be protected only as much as it concerns the privacy and reputation of their surviving relatives. It's fully legal to read and publish the private letters and intimate diaries of historical figures, as it is to make claims about their deeds and motivations that might constitute libel if they were alive.
"It's fully legal to read and publish the private letters and intimate diaries of historical figures"
Only if you don't violate the copyright of the dead person - which, depending on the country, can last 50 to 90+ years after the person's death. Thus to publish you'd have to get the right to do so from said person's estate.
There are many instances where private correspondence, etc. has been banned from publication/the public domain for this reason.
This goes in with the legal principle that these dead people don't have rights, but their surviving relatives do - if whoever inherited those letters and the rights to them decides to sell or publish them, the dead person's privacy is not grounds to prevent that.
>It's fully legal to read and publish the private letters and intimate diaries of historical figures, as it is to make claims about their deeds and motivations that might constitute libel if they were alive.
There are some resitcitions there, for example the Private letters and Diaries would still be covered under copyright and the estate of the person could come after you for Copyright violations if it was with in 70 years of their death.
Also the Estate of a person could absolutely sue you are defamation provided the Estate has a person actively working to police that activity and the resources to hire a lawyer to do it.
So your position that "dead people have no privacy" is really false as they have just as much privacy as people alive it is just most dead people do not have anyone around that will expend the resources to enforce it like a live person
"So your position that "dead people have no privacy" is really false" - no, I strongly assert that my position here is appropriate and that you are mistaken.
The relatives of the deceased can sue you for defamation damages to their reputation (e.g. the widow might assert that the claim about her deceased husband damages her own personal reputation, and if so, perhaps she would have standing but only as far as her own name was slandered). The relatives or the estate can not successfully sue you for defamation of the deceased him/herself.
It's even possible that defamation that happened while the victim was alive gets ignored if they die before the case is settled - for example, Ohio code (http://oh.elaws.us/orc/2311.21) explicitly asserts that libel and slander cases (unlike pretty much everything else) should end in this case.
A famous case is Michael Jackson and the 2019 documentary "Leaving Neverland"; when he was alive, he successfully won a defamation case against Victor Gutierrez with a pretty much equivalent case, however, as this happened after his death, those managing his estate were not able to bring a defamation suit for this documentary because those defamation laws did not apply any more.
