Biography

Paul Ohm is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Colorado Law School. He writes in the areas of information privacy, computer crime law, intellectual property, and criminal procedure. Through his scholarship and outreach, Professor Ohm is leading efforts to build new interdisciplinary bridges between law and computer science.

Before joining the University of Colorado, in 2006, Professor Ohm worked for the U.S. Department of Justice's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section as an Honors Program trial attorney. Before that, he served as law clerk to Judge Betty Fletcher of the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and Judge Mariana Pfaelzer of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. He attended the UCLA Law School where he served as Articles Editor of the UCLA Law Review and received the Benjamin Aaron and Judge Jerry Pacht prizes.

Prior to law school, Professor Ohm worked for several years as a computer programmer and network systems administrator, and before that he earned undergraduate degrees in computer science and electrical engineering from Yale University. Even today, he continues to write thousands of lines of python and perl code each year. Professor Ohm blogs at Freedom to Tinker and has guest blogged at Concurring Opinions and The Volokh Conspiracy.

Recent and Upcoming Publications [SSRN Author Page]

Massive Hard Drives, General Warrants, and the Power of Magistrate Judges, 97 Virginia Law Review In Brief 1 (2011) (responding to Orin Kerr, Ex Ante Regulation of Computer Search and Seizure, 96 Va. L. Rev. 1241).

Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization, 57 UCLA Law Review 1701 (2010).

The Argument Against Technology Neutral Surveillance Laws, 88 Texas Law Review 1685 (2010) (symposium).

Probably Probable Cause: The Diminishing Importance of Justification Standards, 94 Minnesota Law Review 1514 (2010) (symposium).

Book Review, Dr. Generative or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the iPhone, 69 Maryland Law Review 910 (2010) (with James Grimmelmann) (reviewing Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It).

Article Review, I Always Feel Like Somebody's Watching Me, Jotwell, April 29, 2010 (reviewing Ryan Calo, People Can Be So Fake: A New Dimentsion to Privacy and Technology Scholarship).

When Network Neutrality Met Privacy, 53 Communications of the ACM 30 (2010).

Breaking Felten's Third Law: How Not to Fix the Internet, 87 Denver University Law Review DU Process 50 (2010) (symposium).

The Rise and Fall of Invasive ISP Surveillance, 2009 University of Illinois Law Review 1417 (2009).

Computer Programming and the Law: A New Research Agenda, 54 Villanova Law Review 117 (2009).

The Greatest Threat to Privacy, invited contribution to Deep Packet Inspection, A Collection of Essays from Industry Experts, Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (2009).

Good Enough Privacy, 2008 University of Chicago Legal Forum 1.

The Myth of the Superuser: Fear, Risk, and Harm Online 41 U.C. Davis Law Review 1327 (2008).

The Olmsteadian Seizure Clause, 2008 Stanford Technology Law Review 2.

[Full Listing]

Research Agenda

Professor Ohm writes at the intersection of computer science and law, attempting to bridge the two disciplines with rigor.

Current projects include:

1. Privacy: Developing privacy-related works-in-progress including:
   • Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization: Arguing that the newly revealed power of reidentification and failure of anonymization should calls into question key tenants of modern information privacy law.
   • ISP Surveillance: Arguing that there is no greater threat to privacy in society than the ISP.
   • Justification Standards: Pointing out the flawed belief in the differences between probable cause and reasonable suspicion.
2. The Path of Internet Law: Calling for recognition of a new sub-discipline of legal scholarship focusing on the Internet as a dynamic subject and incorporating cutting-edge engineering principles.
3. Software Regulation Clearing House: Building a web-accessible, searchable database of Federal, State, and International laws and regulations that regulate software development.
4. Case Law Natural Language Processing: Using machine learning techniques to analyze case law.
5. Network Measurement Research Privacy Project: Working with Computer Science network researchers to develop rules, technologies, guidance, and processes to better protect the privacy of their research subjects.

Recent and Upcoming Presentations

Panelist, Electronic Privacy Revisited, American Constitution Society for Law & Policy (ACS) 2011 National Convention, Washington DC, June 18, 2011

Panelist, Cutting-Edge Issues in Privacy Regulation, Law and Society (LSA) Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA, June 5, 2011

Privacy Trade-offs, Privacy Law Scholars Conference, Berkeley, California, June 3, 2011.

Seminar on Privacy and Data Anonymization, London, England, UK Information Commissioner's Office, March 30, 2011

Rethinking the Fourth Amendment: Why the Coming Surveillance Society Need Not Lead to a Surveillance State, University of Mississippi School of Law National Center for Justice and the Rule of Law, Fourth Amendment Symposium, Oxford, Mississippi, March 9 - 11, 2011

Privacy and Intermediaries, Stanford Law School, Symposium of the Stanford Technology Law Review, March 3, 2011

Rethinking the Fourth Amendment, University of Pennsylvania School of Law, Symposium of the Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law, January 28, 2011

Privacy and Data Analytics, 32nd International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners, Jerusalem, Israel, October 27-28, 2010

Teaching

Professor Ohm has taught courses in Criminal Procedure, Introduction to Intellectual Property, Copyright, Information Privacy, Quantitative Methods and Computer Crime. In Fall 2010, he is teaching Introduction to Intellectual Property, Information Privacy Seminar, and the LL.M Seminar.