The University of Colorado at Boulder Law School

Tenured and Tenure-Track Faculty
Paul Ohm

University of Colorado Law School
433 Wolf Law Building
401 UCB
Boulder, CO  80309-0401
Phone: (303) 492-0384
E-mail: paul.ohm@colorado.edu
Personal Link: http://paulohm.com

Curriculum Vitae:  View (PDF format)

Bio:
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.

Works In Progress

Forthcoming

Articles

The Rise and Fall of Invasive ISP Surveillance, U. Ill. L. Rev. 1417 (2009).

The Myth of the Superuser: Fear, Risk, and Harm Online, 41 U.C. Davis L. Rev. 1327 (2008). Fear of the powerful computer user, "the Superuser," dominates debates about online conflict. This mythic figure is difficult to find, immune to technological constraints, and aware of legal loopholes. Policymakers, fearful of his power, too often overreact, passing overbroad, ambiguous laws intended to ensnare the Superuser, but which are used instead against inculpable, ordinary users. This response is unwarranted because the Superuser is often a marginal figure whose power has been greatly exaggerated. abstract

Good Enough Privacy, 2008 U. Chicago Legal Forum 1 (2008).

Other Publications

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

The Olmsteadian Seizure Clause, 2008 Stan. Tech. L. Rev. 2 (2008). The Fourth Amendment's Seizure clause is mired in the Eighteenth century. Its counterpart, the Search clause, has evolved through a steady progression of Supreme Court cases from Katz to Berger to Kyllo, no longer to be confined to the property-based notions of privacy embodied in Olmstead v. United States. Instead it is sensitive to modern privacy concerns by extending Constitutional protection to situations that satisfy the reasonable expectation of privacy test. While imperfect, the evolved Search clause has kept the protections of the Fourth Amendment relevant in an age of digital evidence, ubiquitous communication networks, and increasingly sophisticated and invasive surveillance capabilities. abstract

Ohm (with Doug Sicker and Shannon Gunaji), The Analog Hole and the Price of Music: An Empirical Study, 5 J. Telecomm. & High Tech. L. 573 (2007). We present the results of a series of surveys of college-aged consumers of music exploring their willingness to pay for digital downloads of music and measuring the impact of the so-called analog hole. The analog hole refers to a perhaps - unavoidable vulnerability of most digital rights management systems. In short, because people cannot consume digital information directly, every device that performs digital content must convert the digital information into an analog signal, which is very difficult to keep from being copied. abstract

Ohm (with Dirk Grunwald and Doug Sicker), Legal Issues Surrounding Network Monitoring Research, (Invited Paper), Proceedings of the 2007 Internet Measurement Conference (2007).

Commentary, The Fourth Amendment Right to Delete, 119 Harv. L. Rev. F. 10 (2005).

Parallel-Effect Statutes and E-Mail "Warrants": Reframing the Internet Surveillance Debate, 72 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 1599 (2004).

Comment: On Regulating the Internet: Usenet, a Case Study, 46 UCLA L. Rev. 1941 (1999).

Courses: