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Phishing for Computer Fraud Insurance Coverage
Get PDFAccordingly, the following note discusses the disparity between the federal circuit courts regarding the proper insurance coverage for phishing-type attacks. Part I examines the cyber threats companies face when handling sensitive transactions and customer data, as well as the coverage gap between traditional crime insurance policies and the targeted cyber insurance policies that help prevent, detect, and ultimately mitigate the damages resulting from a cybersecurity breach. Part II analyzes the current circuit split and the various contract interpretation strategies, policy considerations, and tests employed in reaching a coverage decision. Part III proposes a resolution to the overarching circuit split that will provide more clarity and predictability to victims of phishing attacks and the insurance companies they emplo
Using Empirical Data to Investigate the Original Meaning of Emolument in the Constitution.
Get PDFThe United States Constitution prohibits federal officials from receiving any “present, Emolument, Office or Title” from a foreign state without the consent of Congress. In interpreting the Constitution’s text, we are to be guided “by the principle that ‘[t]he Constitution was written to be understood by the voters; its words and phrases were used in their normal and ordinary as distinguished from technical meaning.’ However, in trying to determine the “normal” meaning of “emolument” in the Founding Era we are confronted with a term that might as well be a foreign word from an unknown language. The word emolument has virtually vanished from contemporary American English.
A search for either “emolument” or “emoluments” in the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), a digital database containing more than 400 million words of text from the 1810s–2000s, produced only four occurrences since 1990.
In this article, we investigate the mysterious meaning of emolument by using computer-assisted search and analysis of a massive database of texts from the time of the Constitution and find strong patterns of usage that reveal how the word was used at the time the Constitution was drafted and ratified
Revisiting a Classic Problem in Statutory Interpretation: Is a Minister a Laborer?
Get PDFThis study presents a new analysis of an iconic United States Supreme Court case, Holy Trinity Church v. United States (1892). The question in Holy Trinity Church concerned whether a law making it illegal to pay the transportation of a person entering the U.S. under contract to perform “labor or service of any kind” applied to a wealthy Manhattan church that had paid to bring its new rector from England to New York. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the law did not apply to the church’s contract, relying first on the ordinary meaning of “labor” and second on the legislative history of the single construction “labor or service.”
Highlighting the use of corpus linguistic methods, this study tests the arguments presented by the Court and reveals new insights through an analysis of historic and contemporary reference corpora and a specialized corpus of U.S. statutes. The results demonstrate that the disjunctive phrase “labor or service” appeared to be a legal term of art with narrow interpretation that would exclude clergy, but around the time of Holy Trinity Church, slight variations on the phrase (e.g., pluralization, conjunction, and modification) applied to contexts with broader meaning. When examining “labor” as an independent term, those who labored were generally not clergy and the description of the activities of clergy was typically not described as labor, although examination evidenced instances of both. The findings demonstrate the importance of consulting corpora in the evaluation of statutory and ordinary meaning and considering the sociohistorical contexts in which it occurs
Making Children\u27s Rights Widely Known
No full textSince the advent of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the international community has witnessed significant progress on children’s rights in both law and practice. Yet as we reach the 30th anniversary of the CRC, children’s rights violations remain widespread. These abuses reinforce the fact that children’s rights — and human rights more generally — have yet to be fully embraced in all communities. A precursor to children’s rights being fully embraced and respected is to have them widely known and understood. This article asserts that a significant factor in the failure to achieve widespread acceptance of children’s rights is the insufficient attention given to implementation of Article 42 of the CRC and its obligation to make children’s rights “widely known.” Article 42 of the CRC is simultaneously one of the most important and most overlooked provisions of the treaty. Article 42 requires states to ensure that “the principles and provisions of the [CRC] are widely known, by appropriate and active means, to adults and children alike.” Despite the threshold nature of Article 42 — without knowledge that they have rights, individuals cannot seek to realize them — there has been surprisingly little meaningful work done to ensure that Article 42 is fully implemented.This article seeks to invigorate a discourse on Article 42 of the CRC, its meaning, and best practices for securing its full implementation. It includes an analysis of the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child’s jurisprudence on Article 42. The article also discusses how Article 42’s mandate and the human rights education mandate found in CRC Article 29 and other treaties should be understood in relation to each other. Finally, the article maps the relevant stakeholders and their roles in the implementation of Article 42, with a view to building sustained support for law, policies, and programs that advance children’s rights and well-being