This paper looks at cybersecurity and the protection of critical national infrastructure, as an area of systemic risk to society. In particular, it looks at the obligations and potential penalties which apply to cloud providers under the regulatory framework established by the EU’s Network and...

Regulation and the negligence rule are both designed to obtain compliance with desired standards of behavior, but they differ in a primary respect: compliance with regulation is ordinarily assessed independently of the occurrence of harm, whereas compliance with the negligence rule is evaluated...

Minimum asset and liability insurance requirements must often be met in order for parties to participate in potentially harmful activities. Such financial responsibility requirements may improve parties' decisions whether to engage in harmful activities and, if so, their efforts to reduce risk....

This article argues that benefit-cost analysis ("BCA") is extremely challenging in online child safety and digital privacy debates, yet it remains essential that analysts and policymakers attempt to conduct such reviews. While we will never be able to perfectly determine either the benefits or...

Comments of Adam D. Thierer (Mercatus Center at George Mason University) to the Federal Trade Commission in its proceeding on “the consumer privacy and security issues" associated with the “Internet of Things.” The filing argues that the Internet of Things -- like the Internet itself --...

The next big wave of data-driven technological innovation will connect physical devices embedded with tiny computing devices to the Internet in an effort to seamlessly improve the measurements, communications, flexibility, and customization of our daily needs and activities. This “Internet of...

The doctrines of trademark genericism and functionality serve similar functions under the Lanham Act and the common law of unfair competition. Genericism, in the context of word marks, and functionality, for trade dress, bar trademark registration under the Lanham Act and, both under the Act and...

This is a survey of legal liability for accidents. Three general aspects of accident liability are addressed. The first is the effect of liability on incentives, both whether to engage in activities (for instance, whether to drive) and how much care to exercise (at what speed to travel) to...

The WannaCry ransomware attack began on May 12, 2017, and is unprecedented in scale—quickly impacting nearly a quarter-million computers in over 150 countries. The WannaCry virus exploits a vulnerability to Microsoft Windows that was originally developed by the U.S. National Security Agency...