Featured Articles

Identity Theft or Defamation?

Susan Brenner
June 05, 2008 11:47

A recent Wisconsin case illustrates how identity theft can incorporate elements of defamation while remaining a separate and distinct offense.The case is State v. Baron, 2008 WL 2201778 (Wisconsin Court of Appeals). The case's docket number is 2007AP1289-CR; you can use it to find the opinion on...

Recent Articles

Scope of Consent (2)

Susan Brenner
May 11, 2009 12:08

This post is a follow up to a post I did last year, which dealt with consents to search a person or property. In that post, I explained that consent is an exception to the 4th Amendment’s requirement that officers get a warrant to search a person or a place. In that post, I also explained that c...

Identities: The Living, the Dead and the Imaginary

Susan Brenner
May 08, 2009 10:34

A couple of days ago, I did a post on the recent case in which the Supreme Court held that to commit identity theft under the federal statute, you have to know you’re using the personal identifying information of a “real person.” In a comment to the post, someone asked what “real person” means, i.e...

Thoughts, Witches and Crimes

Susan Brenner
May 06, 2009 12:01

In 2001, I published an article on “virtual crime.” It analyzed the extent to which we needed to create a new vocabulary – and a new law – of “cybercrimes.” The article consequently focused on whether there is a difference between “crime” and “cybercrime.” It’s been a long time, and cybercrime ha...

Identity Theft and Real People

Susan Brenner
May 05, 2009 20:53

The U.S. Supreme Court recently decided a case that deals with an issue I wrote about in an earlier post. So I thought I'd update that post a bit. The post was on an issue that had arisen under federal criminal law: whether someone can be convicted of identity theft if they did not know they...

Hearsay and Sentencing

Susan Brenner
May 04, 2009 12:02

This post is, as the title indicates, about using a specific kind of evidence to impose a sentence on someone who has been convicted of a crime.As I explained in an earlier post, the rules of evidence bar the use of hearsay in trials and in other judicial proceedings unless the hearsay in question...

"Uses"

Susan Brenner
May 01, 2009 16:08

In an earlier post, I explained that the federal system and every U.S. state – and many other countries – criminalize what is commonly known as hacking. As I explained there, U.S. statutes, anyway, tend to define hacking as “accessing” a computer without being authorized to do so. And as I noted in ...

Private Stingers

Susan Brenner
April 29, 2009 11:54

This post is basically about stings -- the ruses police use to catch people who are committing a crime. I got a question from someone who was curious about the use of “stings” in the online context. He wondered if it’s legal for an officer to go into a chat room or use some other online resource to...

Medieval

Susan Brenner
April 27, 2009 11:40

Not long ago, something I’d written was peer-reviewed as part of being vetted for publication. In it, I wrote about the problem of keeping order in cyberspace, and one reviewer criticized me for not analogizing cyberspace to the Old West. I submitted my response to that reviewer’s comments – and t...

Spyware, Divorce and the Law Firm

Susan Brenner
April 24, 2009 10:38

This post is about a federal civil case in Louisiana. Becker v. Toca, Civil Action No. 07-7202 (U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana). I’m doing a post on this civil case because it arose from the defendant’s allegedly installing a Trojan horse on a law firm’s computers. Here...