Issue Archives

This Essay develops an approach to interpreting computer trespass laws, such as the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, that ban unauthorized access to a computer. In the last decade, courts have divided sharply on what makes access unauthorized. Some courts have interpreted computer trespass laws broadly to prohibit trivial wrongs such as violating terms of use to a website. Other courts have limited the laws to harmful examples of hacking into a computer....

Antitrust courts often confront “mixed” conduct that has two contrasting effects, one harmful and the other beneficial. For example, a nationwide agreement not to pay college football players harms the players while benefiting fans of amateur sports. An important tool for analyzing mixed conduct is to compare the action to a hypothesized alternative and to ask whether the alternative action is “less restrictive” and hence less harmful....

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, Congress significantly broadened the reach of various regulatory entities through the Dodd-Frank Act. One particular power, found in section 113 of the Act, gives the newly formed Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) the authority to designate nonbank financial institutions (NBFIs) as sys­temically important financial institutions...

Federal extraterritorial prosecutions of terrorists and arms dealers and even narcotics traffickers have become an integral part of modern American criminal justice. But extraterritorial prosecutions raise foundational legal questions—about the fairness of forcing foreign defendants to stand trial in our courts and about the outer boundaries of American power. And extraterritorial prosecutions fore­ground a puzzling inconsistency in constitutional...

Balancing the harms and benefits of speech—what this Article calls “free speech consequentialism”—is pervasive and seemingly unavoid­able. Under current doctrine, courts determine if speech can be regulated using various forms of free speech consequentialism, such as weighing whether a particular kind of speech causes harms that outweigh its benefits, or asking whether the government has especially strong reasons for regulating particular...

Insufficient liquidity can trigger fire sales and wreak havoc on a financial system. To address these challenges, the Federal Reserve (the Fed) and other central banks have long had the authority to provide financial institutions liquidity when market-based sources run dry. Yet, liquidity injections sometimes fail to quell market dysfunction. When liquidity shortages persist, they are often symptoms of deeper problems pla­guing the financial system....

This Note examines the impact of Stern v. Marshall—the Supreme Court’s recent decision on the authority of bankruptcy judges—on United States magistrate judges, with a particular focus on two exercises of magistrate judge authority that have been called into question by circuit courts post-Stern. The Note argues that institutional differences between magistrate judges and bankruptcy judges should lead circuit courts to be...

Trade and Tradeoffs: The Case of International Patent Exhaustion

Daniel J. Hemel* & Lisa Larrimore Ouellette**

Introduction Sellers of patented products ranging from printer cartridges to pharmaceuticals frequently charge higher prices in the United States than they do abroad. To maintain this price differential, such sellers often prohibit the resale of their goods in the United States. The Federal Circuit has maintained that importers may be sued for infringing U.S. patents […]

When a trademark registered with the Patent and Trademark Office is infringed, section 32 of the Lanham Act provides the trade- mark registrant the opportunity to seek remedies in federal court. Thanks to a broad definition of “registrant,” the Act in fact extends standing beyond the registrant herself to her “legal representatives,” among others. This language...

Several recent high-profile criminal cases have highlighted the dynamic nature of identity crimes in a modern digital era and the boundaries prosecutors sometimes push to squeeze arguably wrongful conduct into an outdated legal framework. In many cases, two federal statutes—18 U.S.C § 1028 and § 1028A—provide prosecutors with potent tools to aggressively pursue...