Third-year law student Alyssa DaCunha, Editor-in-Chief of the George Mason Law Review for the 2009-2010 academic year, had her student casenote recently cited in a brief submitted to the Supreme Court in City of Ontario v. Quon. Quon arises from the City of Ontario’s review of text messages sent by a member of a police SWAT team on a government-issued pager and asks whether there is a constitutionally-based right of privacy in text messages for employees of a government agency.

The Petitioner’s brief in Quon looked to DaCunha’s casenote, Txts R Safe 4 2Day: Quon v. Arch Wireless and the Fourth Amendment Applied to Text Messages, 17 Geo. Mason L. Rev. 295 (2009), to draw attention to the complex nature and difficult application of the Stored Communication Act as applied to text messages. DaCunha’s casenote, which examined both the statutory and constitutional protections for text messages, argued that the current statutory protections under the Act are both outdated and inadequate.

Winner of the Arthur E. Schmalz Award for the best entry in the 2009 first-year write-on competition, DaCunha was published in the Law Review's most recent fall issue. She is a graduate of George Washington University, where she was awarded a B.A. in International Affairs.

DaCunha appears center in this photo of 2009-10 Law Review
leadership at 13th Annual Symposium on Antitrust Law.