Apple v. Pepper: Applying the Indirect Purchaser Rule to Online Platforms

Long-established antitrust precedent bars customers who buy a firm’s product through intermediaries from suing that firm for antitrust damages. In Apple Inc. v. Pepper, this “indirect purchaser rule” is brought into the smartphone age in a price-fixing dispute between technology giant Apple and iPhone users. This case will determine whether iPhone users buy smartphone applications directly from Apple through the App Store, or if Apple is merely an intermediary seller-agent of app developers. The indirect purchase rule is generally considered settled precedent. How the rule should apply to online platforms, however, differs between circuit courts, which have split on the question of how to determine which users of online marketplaces are direct purchasers and which users are indirect purchasers. Here, the Supreme Court must decide whether the app purchasers are direct purchasers of apps from Apple. If so, the plaintiff app purchasers can proceed in bringing an antitrust suit against Apple. Alternatively, the Court could decide that the consumer app purchasers are merely indirect purchasers of Apple, who actually buy apps directly from third-party software developers. In that case, Apple would be classified as a passive middleman, immune to antitrust suit by app purchasers. The Court should take the former approach and affirm the decision of the Ninth Circuit holding that consumer app purchasers have standing to sue Apple’s App Store. Otherwise, consumers will be unable to recover for potentially legitimate antitrust injuries, and Apple’s conduct will be unlikely to be challenged by another party

Precession of Isolated Neutron Stars II: Magnetic Fields and Type II Superconductivity

We consider the physics of free precession of a rotating neutron star with an oblique magnetic field. We show that if the magnetic stresses are large enough, then there is no possibility of steady rotation, and precession is inevitable. Even if the magnetic stresses are not strong enough to prevent steady rotation, we show that the minimum energy state is one in which the star precesses. Since the moment of inertia tensor is inherently triaxial in a magnetic star, the precession is periodic but not sinusoidal in time, in agreement with observations of PSR 1828-11. However, the problem we consider is {\it not} just precession of a triaxial body. If magnetic stresses dominate, the amplitude of the precession is not set just by the angle between the rotational angular velocity and any principal axis, which allows it to be small without suppressing oscillations of timing residuals at harmonics of the precession frequency. We argue that magnetic distortions can lead to oscillations of timing residuals of the amplitude, period, and relative strength of harmonics observed in PSR 1828-11 if magnetic stresses in its core are about 200 times larger than the classical Maxwell value for its dipole field, and the stellar distortion induced by these enhanced magnetic stresses is about 100-1000 times larger than the deformation of the neutron star's crust. Magnetic stresses this large can arise if the core is a Type II superconductor, or from toroidal fields $\sim 10^{14}$ G if the core is a normal conductor. The observations of PSR 1828-11 appear to require that the neutron star is slightly prolate.Comment: 40 pages, 1 figure. Discussion added on vortex pinning and compatibility with glitch models. References added and corrected. Typo corrected (Eq. 58

Stand in the Place Where Data Live: Data Breaches as Article III Injuries

Every day, another hacker gains unauthorized access to information, be it credit card data from grocery stores or fingerprint records from federal databases. Bad actors who orchestrate these data breaches, if they can be found, face clear criminal liability. Still, a hacker’s conviction may not be satisfying to victims whose data was accessed, and so victims may seek proper redress through lawsuits against compromised organizations. In those lawsuits, plaintiff-victims allege promising theories, including that the compromised organization negligently caused the data breach or broke an implied contract to protect customers’ personal information. However, many federal courts see a data breach as essentially harmless, or that data breach plaintiff-victims do not necessarily suffer cognizable legal injuries. In practice, this means that the plaintiffs do not have Article III standing, and courts do not reach merits determinations of fault. Instead, a data breach to these courts is only harmful to the extent that it leads to a subsequent injury, like identity theft or fraud. Therefore, data breach victims must suffer even more harm before they can bring a lawsuit. Other courts under this framework do nonetheless find that data breach plaintiff-victims have standing. However, even those courts still wrongfully check whether the plaintiffs suffered future identity theft, fraud, or other harm. Those courts simply find that such subsequent harm is readily apparent. This Note offers a proper approach to standing in data breach lawsuits. I argue that the moment a victims’ data is exposed without their authorization, they suffer a cognizable common law injury, regardless of whether that data exposure actually causes subsequent harm. Rather than thinking of data breaches as a means to future data misuse, courts should think of data breaches as injurious in and of themselves

Searching for Adequate Accountability: Supervisory Priests and the Church’s Child Sex Abuse Crisis

In 2002, the Boston Globe published a report exposing child sex abuse by priests and a cover-up by supervisory priests. Supervisory priests—church officials who supervise lower-ranking priests—concealed reports of sexual abuse by lower-ranking priests and created substantial risks of sexual abuse to children. Prosecutors tried to hold supervisory priests accountable by turning to statutes that either did not capture the moral culpability of priests, like statutes prohibiting obstruction of justice or contributing to the delinquency of a minor; or that did not legally encompass their misconduct, like child-endangerment statutes. Child endangerment captures the moral culpability of supervisory priests’ misconduct, but child-endangerment statutes based on the Model Penal Code (MPC) do not legally cover supervisory priests or their acts. Though supervisory priests chose to suppress reports of child sex abuse, prosecutors cannot constitutionally shoehorn misconduct into statutes—like child endangerment—that were never before interpreted to apply to individuals like supervisory priests. Instead of breaching the supervisory priests’ constitutionally guaranteed notice that their conduct constituted child endangerment, prosecutors should encourage state legislatures to: 1) extend statutes of limitations for crimes against minors and include clergy as mandatory reporters; 2) amend child-endangerment statutes to include supervisory priests and those similarly situated; and 3) criminalize the reckless creation of a substantial risk of child sex abuse, and the reckless failure to alleviate that risk when there is a duty to do so. Absent legislative action, prosecutors should use statutes that represent a lesser degree of moral culpability, such as contributing to the delinquency of a minor or mandatory-reporter statutes. Enacting statutes that both legally encompass and adequately reflect the blameworthiness of supervisory priests will hopefully deter similar misconduct and protect children from sex abuse in institutional settings

Scaphiopus holbrookii

Number of Pages: 4Integrative BiologyGeological Science