When asked about why student-athletes should receive compensation, Jay Bilas, an ESPN analyst, responded with a metaphor: “[I]f your kid is the star of Home Alone, and they say ‘Look, we are just going to pay for expenses. And if they do a really good job, maybe when they‘re older . . . they can get paid then.’ You would say, ‘No, no—this is not the school play. This is a multi-billion dollar business.'” The college athletics industry is worth $16 billion, and it only continues to grow as the number of collegiate students and student-athletes increases. The governing body of collegiate athletics, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (“NCAA”), prides itself on the amateur status of its athletes. To preserve its athletes’ amateurism, the NCAA mandates that its member institutions agree not to compensate student-athletes with athletic scholarships that are above the university‘s cost of attendance. Typically, this type of horizontal agreement—one between competitors that artificially caps the amount a worker can earn—violates section 1 of the Sherman Act as an unreasonable trade restraint. The NCAA, however, is permitted to continue capping athletic scholarships, and thus preserving the amateurism of its athletes, because the Ninth Circuit has determined that the pro-competitive effects of scholarship caps outweigh the anticompetitive effects. The time has come to recognize that the injustice of withholding due compensation from athletes who are generating billions of dollars in revenue for universities outweighs the NCAA‘s interest in preserving amateurism.

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In just the past five years, the United States has suffered numerous hacks into important entities and institutions across the country by ill-intentioned actors. Private companies and government agencies alike have felt the negative impacts of security breaches by hackers infiltrating proprietary and protected systems. Even the United States political landscape has proven vulnerable to bad actors in the realm of cyber security. Furthermore, analysts have attributed some of the most recent highly publicized hacks to state-sponsored groups. As cyber security threats and opportunities for foreign hackers to infiltrate critical systems become more prevalent, it is natural to wonder where the next hack will occur, when it will happen, and whom it will affect.

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*J.D. Candidate, 2018, University of Richmond School of Law. B.A., 2012, University of Virginia. I would like to thank the University of Richmond Law Review staff and editors for their diligent work in preparing this comment for publication; my final editor, Rachel Willer, for her excellent feedback and guidance; and Professor Christopher Cotropia for being an incredible mentor and writing advisor throughout this process. Finally, I would like to thank my parents and my brother for all of their encouragement, love, and support.