Among time-honored legal fictions, the existence of living, breathing readers of published law review articles is one clung to by even the most ardent realists in our legal academic profession. Like a burning bush, evidence to ratify this faith in readership is rare and met with wonderment and gratitude. But it is a special gift indeed when one's work obtains not only an audience, but careful, sustained, critical reflection from readers whose intellectual output serves as inspiration for your own. With the Columbia Law Review Sidebar's recently published responses to my Essay, Trawling for Herring: Lessons in Doctrinal Borrowing and Convergence ("Trawling"), I am the recipient of just such a gift from Professors Robert Tsai and Nelson Tebbe, Colin Starger, and John Greabe.

The financial crisis has prompted an explosion of securities enforcement, with cases alleging an assortment of financial crimes from insider trading to Ponzi schemes. Increasingly, this enforcement activity has taken the form of parallel proceedings: civil enforcement actions brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and criminal actions brought by the local U.S. Attorney's Office. Securities cases easily lend themselves to parallel proceedings because willful violations of federal securities laws violate both civil and criminal laws.

Response to: Lital Helman & Gideon Parchomovsky, The Best Available Technology Standard, 111 Colum. L. Rev. 1194 (2011)

A further question is institutional competence. Should we entrust this determination to an institutional body-the Copyright Office-that is at least arguably susceptible to capture and major public choice concerns? Moreover, does the Copyright Office have the expertise to evaluate technological filters? One would imagine that this would require significant engineering, computer science, and informatics expertise, something the Copyright Office has not been delegated or funded to pursue. And what happens if the Office's determination is contested? How many years and how much money will be spent litigating those issues? And what will happen to the safe harbor in the meanwhile?

Response to: Lital Helman & Gideon Parchomovsky, The Best Available Technology Standard, 111 Colum. L. Rev. 1194 (2011)

Professor Edward Felten has observed, "‘[i]n technology policy debates, lawyers put too much faith in technical solutions, while technologists put too much faith in legal solutions.'" In their Article,The Best Available Technology Standard, Lital Helman and Professor Gideon Parchomovsky demonstrate the power and potential consequences of "Felten's Law" as they consider whether the current "safe harbor" architecture of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA") strikes the appropriate public policy balance concerning online copyright infringement and the open Internet, ultimately concluding that it cannot without the help of "the best filtering technology available" to guide and architect the contours of legally permissible behaviors online.