Catherine Crump

Catherine Crump is a Clinical Professor of Law at UC Berkeley, School of Law, where she directs the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic. Her advocacy and research focus on the impact of new technologies on civil liberties and the justice system. 

Crump’s civil liberties advocacy focuses on uncovering information about how law enforcement agencies deploy surveillance technology and promoting expansive protections for privacy and free speech in the face of increasingly advanced technologies. Crump’s work also examines how technology is reshaping the justice system, from the investigative phase through trial to post-conviction supervision.

Crump has litigated cases on behalf of clients in numerous federal district and appellate courts and in the California Supreme Court. She has also testified before Congress, the European Parliament, and various state legislatures and municipal bodies. She appears regularly in the news media, and her TED talk on automatic license plate readers has been viewed nearly 2 million times.

Crump’s scholarly agenda examines deployments of surveillance technology on the ground by state and local justice agencies. She seeks to harness the details of how surveillance is governed and deployed to inform broader theoretical debates about surveillance, liberty, and democratic accountability. Her article, Surveillance Policy Making by Procurement, appeared in the Washington Law Review. Her article Tracking the Trackers: An Examination of Electronic Monitoring of Youth in Practice, was published by the UC Davis Law Review.

Prior to joining the Berkeley Law faculty, Crump spent nearly nine years at the American Civil Liberties Union. Before that, she clerked for Judge M. Margaret McKeown of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. She is a graduate of Stanford University and Stanford Law School.

Education

B.A., Stanford University (2000)
J.D., Stanford Law School (2004)