Orin S. Kerr is a professor of law at the George Washington University Law School,[1] legal representation for the MySpace "cyber bullying" pioneer Lori Drew and a leading scholar in the subjects of computer crime law and internet surveillance.[1] In the fall of 2006, he visited as an associate professor at the University of Chicago Law School. He is one of the contributors to the The Volokh Conspiracy blog. In March 2006, he began his own legal blog, OrinKerr.com.[2] He suspended posting to his blog in September 2006.[3]
Kerr was born in 1971 in New York, graduated from Tower Hill School in Wilmington, Delaware, received his B.S.E. in Mechanical Engineering from Princeton University, where he distinguished himself in linear algebra. He received his M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University, and his J.D. from Harvard Law School. From 1998 to 2001, he was employed as an Honors Program trial attorney in the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section of the United States Department of Justice Criminal Division.
Before joining the faculty at The George Washington University Law School, Kerr served as a law clerk for Judge Leonard I. Garth of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. He later took a leave of absence from the law school to clerk for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the United States Supreme Court during October Term 2003.
Kerr supported former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson in the 2008 presidential election.[4] On June 5, 2009, he announced that he had accepted a position as Special Counsel on Supreme Court Nominations to Senator John Cornyn, where he would advise on the confirmation proceedings for Sonia Sotomayor.[5]
Kerr's blog contributions at Volokh Conspiracy often focus on developments in internet privacy law and has recently emerged as a leading scholar on Fourth Amendment jurisprudence in electronic communications and surveillance. Kerr was repeatedly cited in the Ninth Circuit's recent opinion Quon v. Arch Wireless Operating Co., Inc.,[6][7] which held that users have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the content of text messages and e-mails. The Supreme Court later took up the case, as Ontario v. Quon, and unanimously reversed.