Ian Samuel is a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School. He is a former law clerk for Judge Alex Kozinski of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and for Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court of the United States. He also previously served on the appellate staff of the Justice Department’s Civil Division, and as a Bristow Fellow in the Office of the Solicitor General.
His areas of scholarly interest focus on cyberlaw and security, especially as they intersect with criminal law and procedure, constitutional law, and intellectual property. He is the author of Warrantless Location Tracking, 83 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 1324 (2008), which evaluated the circumstances under which it ought to be legal for the government to track a person’s movements using her cell phone, and The New Writs of Assistance (forthcoming 2018), which concerns the government's ability to acquire information and aid from network-service providers.
Later this year, the Supreme Court will hear argument in Carpenter v. United States. The question presented is whether the government may, without a warrant and without probable cause, obtain your location information from a third party that has it (like your cell-phone provider). In Carpenter, the government learned where a criminal suspect had gone…
Last week, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Carpenter v. United States, which will decide whether the government may acquire — without a warrant, and without probable cause — records of a person’s movements, using cell-site location information. It was a lively argument, but I’m going to focus on Justice Gorsuch’s questions about what…
