Amy Peikoff is a Litigation Fellow at Pacific Legal Foundation. After managing a Sam Goody record store at 19, Amy went on to earn three degrees, all of which she has drawn upon at some point in her career: Math/Applied Science (BS, UCLA), Law (JD, UCLA), and Philosophy (PhD, University of Southern California).
During law school she served as an Editor on the UCLA Law Review and did an externship with Judge Alex Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit. At USC she wrote her dissertation on privacy and its proper legal protection. She’s taught at universities (UT Austin, UNC Chapel Hill, United States Air Force Academy) and law schools (Chapman, Southwestern), publishing frequently cited law review articles on privacy law, as well as op-eds in leading newspapers on a range of issues.
In 2019 she founded and was president of the Center for the Legalization of Privacy, which submitted an amicus brief in United States v. Facebook, arguing that the government’s proposed consent decree provided unconstitutional warrantless access to Facebook user data to both the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice. In 2020, she became Chief Policy Officer for the free-speech social media platform Parler, a position she held during the platform’s unjust scapegoating and deplatforming in January 2021, as well as during the subsequent rebuilding and return to the App Stores, until the platform was purchased and taken offline in April 2023. She then served as Chief Policy Officer for the free speech video– sharing platform BitChute before co-authoring, with PLF Senior Attorney Mark Miller, an amicus brief filed in the Fifth Circuit case United States v. Smith.
She looks forward to continuing to work on this and other cases in her area of expertise, the “third-party doctrine” of the Fourth Amendment, and to taking advantage of the opportunity the Litigation Fellowship provides to learn about all of PLF’s practice areas.