77 decisions on digital forensics and digital evidence, each summarised from the opinion itself and linked to its full text.
Courts decide digital-evidence disputes under a handful of recurring frameworks: Rule 702 and Daubert for forensic experts, Rule 901 and Rules 902(13)-(14) for authenticating records and hash-verified copies, Rule 37(e) for spoliation of electronically stored information, the Fourth Amendment for searches of devices and cloud accounts, and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for unauthorised access. This repository summarises 77 decisions across those frameworks, each linked to its full text.
Reference material for students, examiners and practitioners. Not legal advice, and not a substitute for reading the opinion — which is why every entry links to it.
12 decisions in this repository
Whether a forensic examiner may testify at all, and to what. Federal courts apply Rule 702 as read by Daubert and Kumho Tire; a shrinking set of states still apply the older Frye 'general acceptance' test. The recurring fight in digital cases is not the science but the fit between a tool's output and the conclusion drawn from it.
16 decisions in this repository
Whether a screenshot, chat log, email, or disk image is what its proponent says it is. Rule 901 sets a low bar — enough evidence for a reasonable juror — and the 2017 amendments added Rules 902(13) and 902(14), which let a certification from a qualified person authenticate machine-generated records and hash-verified copies without live testimony.
21 decisions in this repository
What happens when electronically stored information that should have been preserved is gone. The 2015 amendment to Rule 37(e) replaced a patchwork of circuit standards with one framework, and reserved the severest measures — adverse-inference instructions, dismissal, default — for a finding that the party acted with intent to deprive.
20 decisions in this repository
The scope of ESI discovery and when a court will order forensic imaging of an opponent's device. Rules 26(b)(1) and 34 make proportionality the governing question, and courts treat a mirror image of a hard drive as an intrusive remedy that must be justified by something more than the possibility that deleted files exist.
7 decisions in this repository
Whether the exhibit in the courtroom is the data that was collected, and whether a copy may stand in for the original. Gaps in custody usually go to weight rather than admissibility, but the best-evidence rules for duplicates and the hash-verification practice that underpins them are where forensic method meets evidentiary form.
15 decisions in this repository
Searches of phones, computers, cloud accounts, and travellers at the border. Riley v. California made a warrant the rule for a phone seized on arrest; Carpenter extended Fourth Amendment protection to historical cell-site records. Much of the live dispute now concerns scope — how particular a warrant for a device must be, and what happens to the rest of the data on it.
10 decisions in this repository
The statutes that make unauthorised computer access a crime or a tort, principally the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Van Buren narrowed 'exceeds authorized access' to a gates-up-or-down question of whether the user was entitled to reach the data at all, displacing a decade of circuit law that had read the phrase to reach misuse of data a user could lawfully see.
19 decisions in this repository
The Wiretap Act, the Stored Communications Act, and the state analogues that govern interception and access to stored messages. These statutes decide whether evidence could lawfully be gathered in the first place — the question that precedes admissibility, and the one that most often turns on whether a communication was in transit or at rest.
Every field comes from an opinion retrieved and read on CourtListener, the free case-law database maintained by the Free Law Project. The link on each entry is the URL of the retrieved opinion, copied rather than constructed. Where a holding could not be confirmed in the retrieved text, the case was left out instead of summarised from memory.
Within each entry, the holding and the reasoning report what the court did and why, including where a ruling cuts against the position a practitioner would prefer. The “why this matters” panel is our own reading, and every case page labels it as such.
Insights covers developments as they happen; the course catalogue covers the underlying method. A representative full opinion, for anyone who has not read one end to end: Hoffer v. Tellone.