Law Commons^™

Public Policy And The Insurability Of Cyber Risk, Asaf Lubin

Articles by Maurer Faculty

In June 2017, the food and beverage conglomerate Mondelez International became a victim of the NotPetya ransomware attack. Around 1,700 of its servers and 24,000 of the company’s laptops were suddenly and permanently unusable. Commercial supply and distribution disruptions, theft of credentials from many users, and unfulfilled customer orders soon followed, leading to losses that totaled more than $100 million. Unfortunately, Zurich, which had sold the company a property insurance policy that included a variety of coverages, informed Mondelez in 2018 that cyber coverage would be denied under the policy based on the “war exclusion clause.” This case, now pending, …

Law School News: Distinguished Service Professor: Deborah Gonzalez 05-20-2020, Michael M. Bowden

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Revenge Porn, Thomas Lonardo, Tricia P. Martland, Rhode Island Bar Journal

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Ocasio V. United States: Why The Hobbs Act Punishes Co-Conspirator Extortion, Joshua T. Carback

Maryland Law Review Online

No abstract provided.

Trending @ Rwu Law: Deborah Gonzalez's Post: Bringing Good Fortune (And New Champions) Into The New Year!: 01-22-2016, Deborah Gonzalez

Law School Blogs

No abstract provided.

Trademark Extortion Revisited: A Response To Vogel And Schachter, Kenneth L. Port

Faculty Scholarship

Trademark bullying (a.k.a. trademark extortion) is a very controversial notion in trademark litigation in the United States. There, for sure, is a lot of illegitimate trademark infringement happening. Anecdotally, we also know that trademark holders often overstep in the assertion of their otherwise legitimate rights. For the first time, this article documents how large a problem trademark bullying is and how often it happens. Trademark bullying occurs when there is evidence that a trademark holder asserts a non-famous mark against a non-competing entity on or in connection with goods or services into which the plaintiff has no reasonable expectation of …

The Sheldon Silver Case, Center For The Advancement Of Public Integrity

Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity (Inactive)

Sheldon Silver was the Speaker of the New York State Assembly from 1994 until January 28, 2015. He represents Manhattan's Lower East Side as a Democrat, which he has since 1976.

The federal criminal complaint charges that Silver, since 2000 or earlier, "us[ed] the power and influence of his official position to obtain for himself millions of dollars of bribes.” In the complaint, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (who has jurisdiction over Manhattan), outlines $4 million in illicit funds disguised as outside income. Allegedly, Silver took kickbacks from various parties for whom he secured state …

Culpability And Modern Crime, Samuel W. Buell

Faculty Scholarship

Criminal law has developed to prohibit new forms of intrusion on the autonomy and mental processes of others. Examples include modern understandings of fraud, extortion, and bribery, which pivot on the concepts of deception, coercion, and improper influence. Sometimes core offenses develop to include similar concepts, such as when reforms in the law of sexual assault make consent almost exclusively material. Many of these projects are laudable. But progressive programs in substantive criminal law can raise difficult problems of culpability. Modern iterations of criminal offenses often draw lines using concepts involving relative mental states among persons whose conduct is embedded …

Competing Theories Of Blackmail: An Empirical Research Critique Of Criminal Law Theory, Paul H. Robinson, Michael T, Cahill, Daniel M. Bartels

All Faculty Scholarship

Blackmail, a wonderfully curious offense, is the favorite of clever criminal law theorists. It criminalizes the threat to do something that would not be criminal if one did it. There exists a rich literature on the issue, with many prominent legal scholars offering their accounts. Each theorist has his own explanation as to why the blackmail offense exists. Most theories seek to justify the position that blackmail is a moral wrong and claim to offer an account that reflects widely shared moral intuitions. But the theories make widely varying assertions about what those shared intuitions are, while also lacking any …

The Solution To The Real Blackmail Paradox: The Common Link Between Blackmail And Other Criminal Threats, Ken Levy

Journal Articles

Disclosure of true but reputation-damaging information is generally legal. But threats to disclose true but reputation-damaging information unless payment is made are generally criminal. Most scholars think that this situation is paradoxical because it seems to involve illegality mysteriously arising out of legality, a criminal act mysteriously arising out of an independently legal threat to disclose conjoined with an independently legal demand for money. But this is not quite right. The real paradox raised by the different legal statuses of blackmail threats to disclose and disclosure itself involves a contradiction between our strong intuition that blackmail threats should be criminal …

Comment, Saving Toby: Extortion, Blackmail, And The Right To Destroy, Stephen E. Sachs

Faculty Scholarship

On the website SaveToby.com, one may find many endearing pictures of Toby, the cutest little bunny on the planet. Unfortunately, on June 30, 2005, the lovable Toby was scheduled to be butchered and eaten - unless the website's readers sent $50,000 to save his life. Though Toby's owner has since granted him a temporary reprieve - until Nov. 6, 2006 - the threat raises a fascinating issue of law. Extortion statutes prohibiting threats to destroy property generally do not prohibit threats to destroy one's own property. The law thus provides insufficient protection to a variety of resources on which others …

Controlling Corruption In International Business: The International Legal Framework, Padideh Ala'i

Working Papers

Since 1995, the anti-corruption movement has had success in developing a global legal framework to combat transnational bribery and corruption. A distinguishing feature of the current anti-corruption movement is its emphasis on the economic cost of corruption and the involvement of the international financial institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and regional development banks, in the efforts to combat corruption. As part of their efforts to combat corruption, international financial institutions have made effective anti-corruption reforms a prerequisite for future allocation of funds. The current anti-corruption movement has also been successful in enlisting the participation of …

Crime Talk, Rights Talk, And Double-Talk: Thoughts On Reading Encyclopedia Of Crime And Justice (Review Essay), Michael E. Tigar

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Libarian V. State Bar Of California [Dissent], Jesse W. Carter

Jesse Carter Opinions

Attorney attempted to commit extortion when he sent a letter which threatened that his client, if not paid, would contact the district attorney to file charges of perjury, and the attorney was suspended from practice of law for six months.