Michelle Zakarin - Professor of Legal Process

Professor Zakarin has been teaching Legal Process, the first-year legal research and writing course, since 2003 and, in 2010, she proposed and developed the course Cybercrime which she has been teaching since its adoption.  With an undergraduate degree in Computer Science, she combined her interest in technology with her interest in the law by creating this popular elective course. In Cybercrime, law students study issues involving technology and the applicability of the Fourth Amendment, statutory regulations in obtaining stored data, cyberbullying, stalking, harassment and more. She has appeared on the Touro Law Center radio show, On the Docket, to discuss and answer questions about the United States Supreme Court case Riley v. California that ruled on whether cell phones found incident to a lawful arrest may be searched without a warrant. She also has been a guest on and occasionally hosts the Touro Law Review podcast where authors are interviewed about their latest publications.

 

She recently authored a book chapter in Millennial Leadership in Law Schools. Her chapter is titled, The Importance of Feedback, and it discusses, among other things, the use of technology to provide feedback. Professor Zakarin is the Co-chair of the Conference/Program Committee for the AALS Section on Technology/Law/Education and she has presented at various academic conferences about the use of technology to provide meaningful feedback to students. Her latest article is Requiring What’s Not Required: Circuit Courts Are Disregarding Supreme Court Precedent and Revisiting Officer Inadvertence in Cyberlaw Cases. It explores the way courts treat officer inadvertence as a requirement despite the United States Supreme Court ruling no longer requiring it in plain view searches. It was published in the Winter 2022 edition of the Charleston Law Review.