The Digital Fourth Amendment: Privacy and Policing in Our Online World

When can the government read your email or monitor your web surfing? When can the police search your phone or copy your computer files? In the United States, the answers come from the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution and its ban on ’unreasonable searches and seizures.’

The Digital Fourth Amendment: Privacy and Policing in Our Online World takes the reader inside the legal world of how courts are interpreting the Fourth Amendment in the digital age. Computers, smartphones, and the Internet have transformed criminal investigations, and even a routine crime is likely to lead to digital evidence. But courts are struggling to apply old Fourth Amendment concepts to the new digital world. Mechanically applying old rules from physical investigations doesn’t make sense, as it often leads to dramatic expansions of government power just based on coincidences of computer design.

Written by a prominent law professor whose scholarship has often been relied on by courts in the field, The Digital Fourth Amendment shows how judges must craft new rules for the new world of digital evidence. It explains the challenges courts confront as they translate old protections to a new technological world, bringing the reader up to date on the latest cases and rulings. Informed by legal history and the latest technology, this book gives courts a blueprint for legal change with clear rules for courts to adopt to restore our constitutional rights in the computer age.

Orin Kerr is the William G. Simon Professor at the University of California, Berkeley Law School. Widely considered the leading scholar of the Fourth Amendment of his generation, his scholarship has been cited by courts over 400 times, including in several major Supreme Court cases, and he regularly appears in lists of the most influential and most cited law professors. Kerr’s scholarship and advocacy have been widely profiled and his writing has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal.

Before becoming a law professor, Kerr was a computer crime prosecutor at the United States Department of Justice. He has engineering degrees from Princeton and Stanford and a law degree from Harvard Law School. He is a former law clerk for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the United States Supreme Court.