Author Archive | Orin Kerr

Despite lots of speculation in the conservative blogosphere that the GOP Schiavo memo was a fake planted by Democrats, it turns out that the memo is real. The Washington Post reports today:   The legal counsel to Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) admitted yesterday that he was the author of a memo citing the political advantage to […]

Although these things can be hard to predict, chances are pretty good that I won’t be doing much blogging in the next two weeks. I’ll be out of town a bunch, with speeches at a Fordham Law Review symposium in New York tomorrow, the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference in Seattle next week, and a […]

David Hardy has a report. I am not claiming that this is unethical, if the funding is disclosed, as it was. I tend to think symposia should cover a broad range of viewpoints (not as a matter of ethics, but as a matter of stimulating academic debate, and improving the quality of the pieces within […]

My friend Dan Markel has started a new group blog for youngish law professors, PrawfsBlawg. Dan will start teaching this fall at Florida State, and he has been joined so far by Ethan J. Leib, who will start this fall at Hastings. Please join me in welcoming them to the blogosphere.

There’s been much talk recently about a San Francisco ordinance that might regulate campaign-related speech by bloggers (see this InstaPundit post for some pointers). The proposed text of the March 30 version, the version that I think is the latest draft, is here. I’ve held off on blogging about this because I wanted to figure […]

Google is now offering a new satellite mapping feature available on Google Maps. It lets you see satellite pictures of particular locations; for example, here is a photograph of George Washington University Law School in Washington, DC. This story about the service focuses on the privacy concerns, which seem relatively modest now but will become […]

Over at The Conglomerate, Gordon Smith offers thoughts on the ethics of expedited review of law review articles. My own view is that the standard should be author good faith: authors should only request an expedited review if they genuinely believe it is likely they would accept an offer at the expedited journal over the […]

OpinionJournal’s Political Diary, commenting on a push to name the tomato the New Jersey state vegetable, opines that “by scientists at least, the tomato continues to be regarded as a fruit, not a vegetable.” I’ve heard lots of others say the same. I don’t think that’s quite right; it seems to me that the tomato […]

In today’s New York Times, Paul Krugman considers why there are so few conservatives in academia. [but see update below] Krugman’s hypothesis, in a nutshell: conservatives don’t fit in the academic world because they are anti-scholarship creationists who get their truth from “revelation, not research.” (A special note for our readers in the Upper West […]

My new paper, Searches and Seizures In A Digital World, was recently accepted for publication in the Harvard Law Review and is now available as a draft in electronic form. Here is the abstract:   The new frontier of the Fourth Amendment is the search and seizure of computer data. Created to regulate entering homes and […]

Over at CrimProf, Jack Chin asks if the police can access the contents of person’s cell phone incident to a valid arrest. By way of background, the Supreme Court has held that the police can search a person and any containers on his person at the time of arrest; I gather Jack is asking whether […]

In a decision announced this morning, Johnson v. United States, the Supreme Court decided by a 5-4 vote that the statute of limitations that sets when a federal prisoner can challenge his sentence if it was enhanced based on a since-vacated prior state conviction starts to run when the prisoner receives notice that the state […]

Christine Hurt gives a lawprof’s perspective over at The Conglomerate.

My friend and colleague Daniel Solove has a new and interesting paper currently available in draft form, A Taxonomy of Privacy, forthcoming in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. The paper examines and classifies the different types of legal claims that are placed under the umbrella term of “privacy,” focusing on the specific harms involved […]

Sounds great.