Monica Mark won the Greenhalgh Student Writing Competition, awarded by the American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Section.
Mark’s winning paper, “GPS Tracking, Smartphones and the Inadequacy of Jones and Katz,” suggests that Supreme Court jurisprudence has not kept up with GPS technology.
“There’s obviously no physical trespass involved in planting a GPS unit in a smartphone,” she explains. “And it’s almost impossible to say whether expecting our location to remain private is ‘reasonable’ given the prevalence of GPS units in phones, software programs that share our locations, and other online technologies.”
Mark traveled to Washington, D.C., in October to receive the award, along with a cash prize, at the Criminal Justice Section’s fall conference. “The idea for my paper came from my work in the Remington Center, so what actually means the most to me is that I was able to blend academic questions and real-life situations in a manner that I hope is relevant, useful and interesting,” she says.