Catherine Crump

Affiliated Fellow
Catherine Crump

Catherine Crump is director of the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at UC Berkeley School of Law, as well as Clinical Professor of Law. Crump’s civil liberties advocacy focuses on protecting privacy and free speech in an era of increasingly ubiquitous surveillance. She also focuses on ensuring that new technologies are integrated into the criminal legal system with attention to equity and accuracy.

Crump’s scholarly agenda addresses regulation of surveillance technology, particularly by state and local government. Her piece Surveillance Policy Making By Procurement (opens in a new tab)documented the ways in which federal grants for surveillance technology subvert local democratic control of policing. Another article, Tracking the Trackers(opens in a new tab), focused on the use of location tracking bracelets on youth going through the juvenile system. It demonstrated the ubiquitous nature of this technology and documented its net-widening effect.

Prior to joining the Berkeley Law faculty, Crump spent nearly nine years as an attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, where she litigated First and Fourth Amendment challenges to national security-related policies as well as police surveillance. She filed and argued some of the first civil lawsuits against the government’s policy of conducting suspicionless searches of electronic devices(opens in a new tab) at the international border, argued before the en banc Third Circuit in a case challenging the government’s warrantless use of a GPS tracker on a vehicle(opens in a new tab), and was counsel in a landmark free speech case challenging the Child Online Protection Act(opens in a new tab). She also authored two influential reports, You Are Being Tracked: How License Plate Readers Are Being Used to Record Americans’ Movements(opens in a new tab) and (with co-author Jay Stanley) Protecting Privacy from Aerial Surveillance: Recommendations for Government Use of Drone Aircraft.(opens in a new tab)

Crump is a graduate of Stanford University and Stanford Law School. In 2014 the law school awarded her the Miles L. Rubin Public Interest Award, given annually to one graduate who has made an outstanding contribution to the public interest. She clerked for Judge M. Margaret McKeown of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.