Search and Seizure

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 over two dozen articles on criminal procedure issues, including 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 the influence of race on police searches in Race and Reasonable Suspicion, 73 Fla. L. Rev. 413 (2021).  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.  He is the author of Smart Surveillance: How to Interpret the Fourth Amendment in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge Press 2019), which sets out new guidelines for courts and legislatures in evaluating searches in the modern era.

Professor Simmons has also co-authored three casebooks: Learning Evidence: From the Federal Rules to the Courtroom (with co-author Debby Merritt) (5th ed. 2021 West Publishing), Learning Criminal Procedure: Investigations (with co-author Renee Hutchins) (2nd Ed. 2019 West Publishing), and Learning Criminal Procedure: Adjudications (with co-author Renee Hutchins) (2nd Ed. 2019 West Publishing).   He teaches Evidence, Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, and Computer Crime and Surveillance.