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

Curriculum Vitae:  View (PDF format)

http://paulohm.com

Bio:

Paul Ohm is an Associate Professor at the University of Colorado Law School. He specializes in information privacy, computer crime law, intellectual property, and criminal procedure.

In his work, Professor Ohm tries to build new interdisciplinary bridges between law and computer science. Much of his scholarship focuses on how evolving technology disrupts individual privacy. His article Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Suprising Failure of Anonymization, 57 UCLA Law Review 1701, has sparked an international debate about the need to reshape dramatically the way we regulate privacy. He is commonly cited and quoted by news organizations including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and NPR. In 2010, he was awarded the prize for Excellence in Teaching by the students of Colorado Law.

Prior to joining the University of Colorado, Professor Ohm served as an Honors Program trial attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section. Before that, he clerked for Judge Betty Fletcher of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and Judge Mariana Pfaelzer of the United States District Court for the Central District of California. He earned his law degree from the UCLA School of Law 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, 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.

Works In Progress

Articles

The Fourth Amendment in a World Without Privacy, 81 Miss. L.J. 1309 (2012).

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

The Argument Against Technology-Neutral Surveillance Laws, 88 Tex. L. Rev. 1685 (Symposium: Law at the Intersection of National Security, Privacy, and Technology) (2010).

Probably Probable Cause: The Diminishing Importance of Justification Standards, 94 Minn. L. Rev. 1514 (Symposium: Cyberspace & the Law: Privacy, Property, and m Crime in the Virtual Frontier). (2010).

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

When Net Neutrality Met Privacy, 52 Communications of the ACM (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).

Press, Media & Publicity

Courses: