Ric Simmons is the Chief Justice Thomas J. Moyer Professor for the Administration of Justice and the Rule of Law at Moritz College of Law at the Ohio State University. 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 and then served for four years as an assistant district attorney for New York County. He was an acting assistant professor at New York University School of Law from June 2000 through June 2003 before coming to Moritz.
Professor Simmons’ research focuses on the intersection of the Fourth Amendment and new technology. He has written about the search of cell phones in The Missed Opportunities of Riley v. California, 12 Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law (2014), the use of new surveillance techniques in Technology-Enhanced Surveillance by Law Enforcement Officials, 60 New York University Annual Survey of American Law 711 (2005)), and hyper-intrusive surveillance in Can Winston Save Us from Big Brother? The Need for Judicial Consistency in Regulating Hyper-Intrusive Searches, 55 Rutgers Law Review 547 (Winter 2003)). He has also written about the privatization of the criminal justice system in Private Criminal Justice, 42 Wake Forest Law Review 911 (2007) and Private Plea Bargains, 89 North Carolina Law Review 1125 (2011). Professor Simmons has been frequently cited in the local and national media on criminal procedure issues.
Professor Simmons has also co-authored two casebooks: Learning Evidence: From the Federal Rules to the Courtroom (with co-author Debby Merritt) (3rd ed. 2014 West Publishing) and Learning Criminal Procedure (with co-author Renee Hutchins) (2014 West Publishing). He teaches Evidence, Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, and Computer Crime and Surveillance.
