SCOTUSblog on camera: Orin Kerr – Part five

“The Roberts Court”; “the Fourth Amendment Court”; and understanding constitutional values, issues and change.

In this five-part interview, Orin Kerr, Fred C. Stevenson Research Professor of Law at the George Washington Unversity Law School in Washington, DC, discusses his background in mechanical engineering and in law; clerking for Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy and Judge Leonard I. Garth of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit; working in the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section of the U.S. Department of Justice; and teaching law. A scholar of criminal procedure and computer crime law, Professor Kerr talks about how the Supreme Court considers cases, understands legal principle and contends with changing technology; the importance of predictability in law; the institutional position of the Court; and the role of politics in understanding the Court and its membership.

“One thing that I didn’t appreciate until I was a law clerk was the extent to which the Justices are generalists…You just sort of imagine that they have, you know. clear agendas and a sense of, ‘I’m going from here to here to here.’ That’s not generally the case. That’s not the norm. The norm is that they’re generalist Justices.”

(Fabrizio di Piazza)