I'm Marissa Wong, intern at Lawfare, with an episode from the Lawfare

for May 9, 2006.

On April 27th, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Chatri v. the United States.

The case centers on a Fourth Amendment illegal search challenge to the government's use of geoffence warrants.

For today's archive, I chose an episode from January 9, 2025, in which Jack Goldsmith sat down with Orrin Kerr to discuss discuss Care's new book on how the Fourth Amendment has adapted or remained stagnant in the digital age.

The pair discussed the history of the Fourth Amendment, how its protections are complicated by the advent of the digital world,

and how courts have interpreted the Fourth Amendment in light of new technology.

Thank you. and how courts have interpreted the Fourth Amendment and light of new technology. It's the Lawfare podcast. I'm Jack Goldsmith from Harvard Law School with Oren Kerr, a professor at Stanford Law School.

That's what equilibrium adjustment ends up being. It's sort of carrying out that instinct to try to find some middle ground in a world where the technology is constantly coming along and saying, oh, you have that old legal rule?

Well, guess what?

That legal rule that was balanced in the old world is now unbalanced in the new ruled,

and it either dramatically expands government power or dramatically cuts back on government power,

and now it stinks.

What are you going to do?

Today we're talking about his new book, The Digital Fourth Amendment, privacy and policing in our online world.

I think it's fair to say that you're the world's expert in this field, but you tell an interesting story, an interesting anecdote in your introduction about how it almost didn't come to be, about your first job in the Justice Department and the kind of difficulties you faced in entering the field. Yeah, well, first of all, thanks, Jack, very much

for having me on. The story of how I started in Fourth Amendment law and computer crime and

digital evidence is I was hired by mistake. Showed up the first day of my new job at the Justice Department. I was so excited. I was going to be a cybercrime prosecutor. It was the fall of 1998, early internet boom. And I showed up at the office and they said, so where are you going? And I said, I thought I'm going here. And they were like, oh, we were afraid of that. Yeah, it turned out they filled out the wrong form. And they'd wanted to interview me, but instead they hired me and they were stuck with me. And they made absolutely clear they did not want to hire me. And I ended up working on a lot of legal issues about computer crime because there was basically nothing else I could do. I

was right out of a clerkship. I was 20, whatever, seven years old. And I knew nothing. And so they

gave me all these legal projects because they figured, well, you know, at least the kid can do law.

And I ended up like just absolutely loving these amazing legal issues that were just beginning

to happen. And I've

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