Orin Samuel Kerr (born June 2, 1971) is an American legal scholar known for work on criminal procedure and the Fourth Amendment, computer crime law, and internet surveillance. He has been a professor of law at Stanford Law School since 2025 and is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is a longstanding contributor to the legal blog The Volokh Conspiracy (Source: en.wikipedia.org).
Background
Kerr studied mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University, graduating in 1993 with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering, and received a Master of Science in mechanical engineering from Stanford University in 1994. He earned a JD from Harvard Law School in 1997, where he was an executive editor of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy and an editor of the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology (Source: en.wikipedia.org).
He clerked for Judge Leonard I. Garth of the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit from 1997 to 1998, then served from 1998 to 2001 as a trial attorney in the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section of the US Department of Justice's Criminal Division. He clerked for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the Supreme Court during October Term 2003 (Source: en.wikipedia.org).
Academic career
Kerr joined the faculty of George Washington University Law School in 2001, was appointed a scholar-in-residence at the Library of Congress in 2012 in a two-year part-time position focused on information technology, privacy, and criminal justice, and moved to the USC Gould School of Law in 2018, the UC Berkeley School of Law in 2019, and Stanford Law School in 2025 (Source: en.wikipedia.org).
He advised Senator John Cornyn of the Senate Judiciary Committee as Special Counsel for Supreme Court Nominations during the confirmations of Sonia Sotomayor in 2009 and Elena Kagan in 2010, and argued before the Supreme Court in Davis v. United States (2011). He was among the lawyers for the defendant in United States v. Lori Drew (Source: en.wikipedia.org).
Scholarship
Kerr's Fourth Amendment work includes "Four Models of Fourth Amendment Protection" (Stanford Law Review, 2007), "The Case for the Third-Party Doctrine" (Michigan Law Review, 2009), "An Equilibrium-Adjustment Theory of the Fourth Amendment" (Harvard Law Review, 2011), and "The Mosaic Theory of the Fourth Amendment" (Michigan Law Review, 2012). His computer-crime work includes "Cybercrime's Scope: Interpreting Access and Authorization in Computer Misuse Statutes" (New York University Law Review, 2003) and "A User's Guide to the Stored Communications Act, and a Legislator's Guide to Amending It" (George Washington University Law Review, 2004) (Source: en.wikipedia.org).
"Norms of Computer Trespass" (Columbia Law Review, 2016) supplies the authorization framework relevant to disputes over automated access and agent behaviour, and is treated as a companion doctrinal primer to Section 230 coverage of platform liability (Norms of Computer Trespass — Orin S. Kerr (Essay, 2022); see Amazon v. Perplexity AI and Section 230 (47 U.S.C. § 230)).
He was repeatedly cited in the Ninth Circuit's 2008 opinion in Quon v. Arch Wireless Operating Co., which held that users have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the content of text messages and e-mails; the Supreme Court later took the case as Ontario v. Quon and unanimously reversed (Source: en.wikipedia.org).
Relationships
- author-of: Norms of Computer Trespass — Orin S. Kerr (Essay, 2022)
- related: Amazon v. Perplexity AI — computer-trespass and authorization questions raised by agent access
- related: Section 230 (47 U.S.C. § 230), Eric Goldman — companion internet-law and intermediary-liability scholarship