You have three choices for your final assignment—a traditional research paper, bibliographic essay or legal brief.

You're free to write on any subject related to communication law as long as your paper deals, at least in part, with technology and law.  The essay should run roughly 15-25 tightly written pages.  I want you to think about this essay as a manuscript for publication in a scholarly journal.  Your title page should identify the publication for which your work is intended.  Also, you may use this assignment to begin ideas for your thesis or dissertation.

A one-paragraph statement on your topic is due Thursday Oct. 16.

I'll ask you to make a short (less than five-minute) progress report Thursday Oct. 30.

The paper is due on Friday, Dec. 5.  The last two class periods will be devoted to presentations of your papers.

1.  Start with a precise question.

2.  From the start, you should have at least one journal, preferably two, that would be likely outlets for your essay.  Some of your writing decisions will be governed by knowing the nature of the audience for the journal.

3.  The research:

·         Obviously look at the legal literature but also consider materials from the social sciences.

·         Look at some materials on technologies that are transforming your area of law.

·         Try to use a variety of secondary sources—books, articles from social science journals, articles from law reviews.

·         But the majority of your sources should be primary sources.

4.  How much context do you need?  How far afield should you go?  Find the right proportions: the amount of space devoted to parts of your essay should be roughly proportional to those parts' importance.  Don't let your background overwhelm your foreground.

5.  Writing your essay:

·         Use an organizational framework that's appropriate for your journal.

·         Frame your essay in terms of the questions, issues that interest the audience of the journal for which you're writing.

·         Be certain to cite key literature that links your question to the literature of the field in which you're publishing.

·         Most of your analysis should be based on your reading of primary sources.

6.  Examples:

• Sandra Braman and Stephanie Roberts, "Advantage ISP: Terms of Service as Media Law," New Media & Society 5 (Sept. 2003): 422-48.

• Guido Schryen, "Anti-Spam Legislation: An Analysis of Laws and Their Effectiveness," Information & Communications Technology Law 16 (March 2007): 17-32 (full text available through UW database Academic Search Complete (EBSCO).

• Almost any article from a communication or media studies scholarly journal (e.g., Journal of Communication, European Journal of Communication, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly) that focuses on law and policy would be a model.

1.  Bear in mind the difference between a traditional research report and a bibliographic essay: The bibliographic essay focuses on what scholars say about a subject, how they approach and analyze it; the research paper focuses on your own analysis (you use some scholarly literature in preparing it, but rely mostly on primary sources).

2.  Start with a question or topic.  Your task is to find and synthesize the scholarly literature that bears on your question or topic.

3.  From the start, you should have at least one journal, preferably two, that would be likely outlets for your essay.  Some essays define themselves by the journals.

4.  What literatures do you need to consult?  What areas of scholarly literature intersect your topic?

·         Obviously look at the legal literature but also consider materials from the social sciences.

·         Look at some materials on technologies that are transforming your area of law.

·         Try to use a variety of sources—books, articles from social science journals, articles from law reviews.

5.  How much context do you need?  How far afield should you go?  Find the right proportions: the amount of space devoted to parts of your essay should be roughly proportional to those parts' importance.  Don't let your background overwhelm your foreground.

6.  Writing your essay:

·         start with some general introductory remarks and not too much lit; summarize what you found;

·         move from general to specific in most, though not necessarily all, instances;

·         develop an organizational framework that breaks the existing lit into groups of significant questions or topics;

·         frame your essay in terms of the questions, issues that interest the audience of the journal for which you're writing;

·         move towards postulating a research question that could be examined in a full-blown research inquiry.

7. Suggestions about citation style:

·         Somewhere in your essay you need to have complete citations but you don't need to encumber the text with too much publication information.  In the text, you generally need to mention the author and often the date if it's helpful in showing the relation of one work to others.

·         There are several ways to handle the scholarly apparatus without burdening the text.  Two possibilities: traditional footnotes/endnotes or the social science author-date citations with reference list.

8. Examples (most examples of published bibliographic essays are much longer and of wider scope than expected for this assignment and few focus on law and new media; hence, the ones that follow do not perfectly represent what you should be doing for this assignment):

• Henry Farrell, "Regulating Information Flows: States, Private Actors, and E-Commerce," Annual Review of Political Science 9 (2006): 353-74.

• Almost any article in an Annual Review of Sociology or other Annual Review series.

• I can show you hard copies of bibliographic essays that deal with the media (though not with new media law).

Another choice for your major writing assignment is a variation on the research paper -- a legal brief or an essay structured along the lines of a law review article.

1. The basic form of the brief is to open with an assertion.  The remainder of the essay unfolds by offering a series of supporting arguments and evidence.

2. Although your legal brief should be written as an essay, this type of article often has an explicit outline that clearly establishes the relationship of each part to one another.

3. Ideally, much of your supporting argumentation and evidence is drawn from legal materials (court rulings, congressional reports, and law review writers).

4. Ideally, too, you also incorporate argumentation and evidence from the social sciences that support the legal assertion you're making.

5. Your brief might consider how your ideas would be implemented; this is, you can offer concrete suggestions.

6. For this assignment, you don't need to use legal citation style, though if you want to begin mastering that I can help you.