Law Commons^™

Criminal Trespass And Computer Crime, Laurent Sacharoff

William & Mary Law Review

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) criminalizes the simple act of trespass upon a computer—intentional access without authorization. The law sweeps too broadly, but the courts and scholars seeking to fix it look in the wrong place. They uniformly focus on the term “without authorization” when instead they should focus on the statute’s mens rea. On a conceptual level, courts and scholars understand that the CFAA is a criminal law, of course, but fail to interpret it comprehensively as one.

This Article begins the first sustained treatment of the CFAA as a criminal law, with a full elaboration of …

Smart Contracts And The Limits Of Computerized Commerce, Eric D. Chason

Faculty Publications

Smart contracts and cryptocurrencies have sparked considerable interest among legal scholars in recent years, and a growing body of scholarship focuses on whether smart contracts and cryptocurrencies can sidestep law and regulation altogether. Bitcoin is famously decentralized, without any central actor controlling the system. Its users remain largely anonymous, using alphanumeric addresses instead of legal names. Ethereum shares these traits and also supports smart contracts that can automate the transfer of the Ethereum cryptocurrency (known as ether). Ethereum also supports specialized "tokens" that can be tied to the ownership of assets, goods, and services that exist completely outside of the …