Ric Simmons

Associate Professor of Law

Professor Simmons joined the Moritz Law faculty in 2003. He is a graduate of Columbia Law School, where he was a Stone Scholar and a senior editor of the Columbia Law Review.

Following law school, he clerked for the Honorable Laughlin E. Waters of the Central District of California.

Professor Simmons served for four years as an assistant district attorney for New York County, and was an acting assistant professor at New York University School of Law from June 2000 through June 2003.

He teaches Evidence, Criminal Law, and the Prosecution Practicum.

Selected Publications:

• Re-Examining the Grand Jury: Is there Room for Democracy in our Criminal Justice System?, 82 Boston University Law Review 1 (2002) (excerpted in Joshua Dressler & George C. Thomas, Criminal Procedure: Principles, Policies, and Perspectives (2d ed. 2002).
• From Katz to Kyllo: A Blueprint for Adapting the Fourth Amendment to Twenty-First Century Technologies, 53 Hastings law Journal 6 (2002) (reprinted in Search and Seizure Law Report, Vol. 30, No. 5 (May 2003).
• Can Winston Save Us from Big Brother? The Need for Judicial Consistency in Regulating Hyper-Intrusive Searches, 55 Rutgers Law Review 547 (Winter 2003).
• Technology-Enhanced Surveillance by Law Enforcement Officials, 60 New York University Annual Survey of American Law 711 (2005).
• Not "Voluntary" but Still Reasonable: A New Paradigm for Consensual Searches, 80 Indiana Law Journal 773 (2005).
• The Two Unanswered Questions of Illinois v. Caballes: How to Make the World Safe for Binary Searches, 80 Tulane Law Review 411 (2006).
• Conquering the Province of the Jury: Expert Testimony and the Professionalization of Fact-Finding, 74 University of Cincinnati Law Review 1013 (2006).
• The Audience for an Evidence Class: Teaching to Litigators, Scholars, or Bar-Examinees? 50 St. Louis Univ. Law Journal 1063 (2006).
• Why 2007 is not 1984: A Broader Perspective on Technology's Effect on Privacy and the Fourth Amendment, 97 Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology (2007).
• Private Criminal Justice, 42 Wake Forest Law Review 911 (2007).
• Learning Evidence: From the Federal Rules to the Courtroom (with co-author Debby Merritt) (2009 West Publishing).