Law 897: The Law in Cyberspace -- Overview of Seminar

Law 897: The Law in Cyberspace
Overview of the Seminar

From 1930 to 1941, New York University published the Air Law Review, devoted to the proposition that there was something distinctive about regulation of aircraft, flight and radio broadcasting that defined a legal subspeciality, because all of them took place in the air. In 1941, the Review ceased publication.

Today, there are multiple law journals devoted to Internet law, and lawyers debate whether Internet law comprises a coherent legal field. Some commentators have suggested that the Internet poses unprecedented challenges to conventional law, which assumes that both regulatory and adjudicatory jurisdiction derive from geographic boundaries. Legal scholars have gone so far as to suggest that we treat the Internet as its own distinct jurisdiction, and adopt Internet-specifc laws, rules, and adjudicatory mechanisms. Others insist that talking about the law in cyberspace is as silly as talking about the law in the air. The Internet, they insist, is made up of computers and networks that, like the air, exist in extant jurisdictions and are subject to their laws. Both characterizations have a lot of truth to them.

In a very short time, the Internet has reshaped our lives. According to the Pew Internet and Life Project, 73% of Americans are Internet users, and and 42% have broadband Internet access at home. Nonetheless, we are only beginning to formulate the laws that govern cyberspace. A variety of efforts to apply current law to the Internet have yielded a variety of different results. Attempts to draw new laws to address the distinct problems of the networked digital environment have run into logistical and political problems as well as legal ones. The seminar will examine the law in cyberspace as it develops. Most of the assigned texts will be material available online.

Grades:

Your grades will consist of three, equally weighted components:

1) The reading assignment designed for the class. (I will be looking primarily at your assignment's effectiveness in enabling the members of the seminar to learn interesting and challenging material, and will pay attention both to presentation and to selection of sources.)

2) A 20-to-30 page research paper on the same topic.

3) Class participation over the course of the semester.

Assignments and class discussion:

We will meet every Wednesday from 3:40 p.m. to 5:40 p.m.

Most of the material you will be reading in preparation for class over the course of the seminar will be selected by your classmates.

I have posted a list of potential topics here. After finding out from all of you which topics you're interested in working on, I will assign a single topic to each of you.

For each topic, the person assigned to cover that topic will, after consulting with me, create a reading assignment. The reading assignment will contain any explanatory material and instructions along with citations to the assigned readings, including complete URLs for material available on the Internet. I will put the assignment on the web server before the previous week's class, and students in the seminar will have that week to read the assigned material for the topics scheduled for the following class. We will typically cover two topics each week.

You should plan on spending six to eight hours completing each week's reading assignment, and additional time doing the research for your own class topic and paper.

Class discussions will proceed as follows: The person assigned for each topic will begin and conclude the discussion with a short (5 to 10 minute) presentation. Every member of the class will then be expected to speak for two minutes about the assigned material.

Reading assignments should be in a form that will allow them to be converted into HTML files and put up on the UM web server, and should be able to be completed by the average student not encountering unusual technical difficulties in two to three hours. (I know that I just told you to expect to spend six to eight hours doing this reading. How do two assignments, each supposed to take two to three hours, add up to six to eight hours? The answer is that it will take many of your classmates longer to do the reading than you think. If you aim for two to three hours, they should be confident that they can get the reading for your half of the class done in three to four hours.) You must turn in your assignment for the class by 9 a.m. Tuesday morning of the week preceding the class scheduled for your topic. Late assignments will result in a grade deduction.

There is no requirement that you learn to write HTML files, but there are a variety of useful aids that will teach you how to do so, and many common applications programs include a web translation utility. (Recent versions of all major word processing programs include utilities to convert files into either HTML or ascii text. There are also a number of HTML conversion utlities available on the web as freeware or shareware.) I will accept assignments in HTML or in ascii text. You may give me a CD, or e-mail your file to me. You may in addition supplement your assignments with material available only in hard copy format, so long as you distribute it to the class on the Wednesday before your topic is scheduled.

You are responsible for the accuracy of all citations you provide to the class. (You should always try to check your assignment on a computer other than the one on which you create it, so that you can make sure that you have all the files you need.) That said, I won't put anything up on the server until I have checked the links to make sure they work. To the extent I need to spend a substantial amount of time correcting your citations and links, I will take that into account in assigning that portion of your grade. It is a good idea to make sure I have a telephone number, email address, or pager number at which you can be reached on the day you turn in your assignment.

I will give you some initial suggestions for sources to consult to start your research. After you have developed some ideas for your assignment, we should discuss your plans either in person or by email. The week before your assignment is due, please send me an email message giving me a brief description of the material you plan to assign.

Originality, creativity and cleverness are appropriate for the class reading assignments. Other students in the seminar will appreciate them, and I will consider them favorably in your grade. At the same time, you should keep in mind that fancy or animated graphics load very slowly on machines connected to the Internet via dial-up connections.

Every student is expected to attend every class and to have something thoughtful to say on every topic, and every student will be graded on the remarks she or he makes in each class. In addition, I will take the quality of class discussion on a topic as an indication of the effectiveness of the assignment for that topic. (Let me repeat that: whether you attend that week's class and what you have to say with respect to a given assignment will be among the things I consider in assigning a grade to the student who created that assignment.) As a matter of fairness to the other members of the seminar, you need to take sufficient time with each week's assignments to be able to contribute to the discussion.

Papers

Your paper should be on the same broad topic as your class assignment, but need not focus on the same specific aspects of that topic.

I have assigned Eugene Volokh's Academic Legal Writing as a useful resource for helping you to plan, organize and write your reserach papers.

Papers must be turned in in both hard copy format and in electronic format. (Electronic copies may be any word processing program, in HTML or in ASCII text; via CD or email.)

All footnotes and citations must conform to the current edition of the Bluebook or the ALWD manual. Citations to material available over the Internet should give the URL. (E.g., URL: http://iitf.doc.gov/index.html), and should generally conform to Bluebook rule 17.3.3. I will not post your paper on the Internet without your permission.

Papers must reflect analysis and original thought as well as description. Be careful to cite your sources. I will check citations to sources I'm not familiar with.

All papers must be turned in on or before 5 pm on Thursday December 7.

Servers:

This document, the revised syllabus, the list of topics and a hypertext-enhanced bibliography will be available at http://www.umich.edu/~jdlitman/classes/cyber/. In addition, because servers sometimes go down, I will post copies of the assignments and files for the current week only at http://www.digital-copyright.com/cyberspace/

Schedule:

In order to make sure that we cover the topics we need to in coherent fashion, and to give enough preparation time to students responsible for early topics, I need to distribute a final syllabus and schedule of assignments in early September. I have posted a list of potential paper topics here. Please give me, as soon as possible, but no later than noon on Monday September 11, your preferred five topics from that list in ranked order. If you prefer, you can list more general topics than those on the list (e.g., "Internet Privacy"), and I will assign you to one of the topics within that area. You may also list up to three dates that you would find inconvenient for your scheduled presentation.

The order in which the topics are listed is not the order in which we will reach them in the seminar, since I will put together a schedule that seems to flow in a coherent progression based on what topics you do and don't select. If what's really important to you is to ensure that your presentation is scheduled, e.g., during September and you don't care what that topic is so long as, e.g., it doesn't have anything to do with Internet domain names, tell me so and I will try to take that into account in scheduling. If you would like to write on a topic not on the attached list, please email the topic and an associated link to me before the first class, and I will either add it to the list or explain why not. If it's already after the first class, please come see me before turning in your topic preferences.

I will try to honor preferences, and will, in the event of a conflict, make selections on the basis of the class's scheduling convenience. Within those constraints, I will give topic choices turned in earlier precedence over choices turned in later, so it's in your interest to turn in your topic selections as early as possible.

Topic selections and all other assignments may be turned in to my mailbox on the 3d floor of Hutchins Hall, slipped under my door at 427 Hutchins Hall, handed to me, or e-mailed to me. If you are sending me something via e-mail, please don't assume that I have received it unless I send you a confirming message via e-mail.

Go to the list of paper topics

Go to the seminar Syllabus

Go to the list of Sources

Go to the New Developments page