Biography
Orin Kerr is a Professor at Stanford Law School, where he teaches and writes on criminal law and criminal procedure. He helped found the field of computer crime law, which studies how traditional legal doctrines should adapt to digital crime and digital evidence. He is widely considered a leading authority on the Fourth Amendment.
Kerr has authored more than eighty law review articles, over half of which have been cited in judicial opinions. He has also authored popular casebooks and co-authored the leading criminal procedure treatise. Kerr’s new book is The Digital Fourth Amendment: Privacy and Policing in Our Online World (Oxford 2025).
Before entering academia, Kerr was a trial attorney in the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section at the U.S. Department of Justice as well as a Special Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia. He has also served as a law clerk to Judge Leonard I. Garth of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the United States Supreme Court. Before attending law school, Kerr earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in mechanical engineering.
Kerr was previously a law professor at George Washington University, the University of Southern California, and the University of California at Berkeley. He also has been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale.
