This dissertation is a rhetorical inquiry into digital rights advocacy. Digital rights—the set of rights and liberties that best ensure an individual’s ability to access information and participate in online space—are of increasing importance as network technology spreads into more areas of modern life. A central contribution of this study is that there is a feedback loop between law, technology, and discourse that structures and informs advocacy. Another primary contribution is the concept of vernacular legal expertise, or legal knowledge acquired in the absence of official legal credentials that allows individuals to advocate for their rights. This study argues that without accounting for vernacular legal expertise, we risk not fully understanding the complex interactions of law, technology, and discourse in digital rights advocacy. The three case studies comprising this study—net neutrality, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act Section 1201 rulemaking, and the debate over revenge porn (or non-consensual pornography) legislation—highlight different levels of vernacular intervention by documenting different ways that the feedback loop between law, discourse, and technology manifests itself. By examining the arguments made by everyday people and their advocates across these three diverse case studies, this research illustrates the role of vernacular legal expertise in digital rights advocacy by highlighting the fundamental assumptions, or topoi, in which groups base their arguments. These arguments are rooted in early-internet beliefs in the natural resistance of the internet to regulation, a sense of free speech absolutism, and a belief in tinkering as a right and a liberatory endeavor. This creates a tension in digital rights advocacy between government regulation and privatized governance (the governance decisions made by corporations), as well as between citizenship as tied to both the internet and the nation-state. While digital rights are often grounded within a U.S. legal framework, the arguments made in their favor appeal to a more general sense of internet citizenship. This dissertation argues that the ways in which everyday people reconfigure law within their vernacular communities can affect legal norms and thus law itself.