The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

Just a quick post to gripe about my paper.

I really liked my telecom law class - full of interesting and important stuff. The problem though was that we didn't get to the cool Internet stuff until the very end, which meant we couldn't write our interesting Internet regulation papers until the very end either when we finally had some idea what was going on. Yeah, I guess we could have started earlier if we'd written about some stodgy old telephony topic, but where's the fun in that??? Unfortunately this situation has led to a horrible time crunch in April as we had to do the entire paper while also preparing for our exams. Plus because the Internet material didn't come until the end of the semester when all the ambient end-of-semester stress had kicked in, it was harder to get a good grip on this very technical and confusing stuff. (Believe me when I say it's confusing - even the Supreme Court gets it wrong...)

Thus my paper is driving me up the wall. I do like what I'm writing about, and I even like the way I'm writing it (for the most part - I need to take a break right now though because my writing is losing its crispness). But it's such incredible slogging to get all the cites together because everything is all over the place and I haven't gotten a feel for where. With other papers I'll have worked with the material long enough to get a sense of what is contained in which materials where so that when I need a substantiation for some thought in my head I can recall which document contained it. Unfortunately I can't really do that with this topic, so I'm having to look through way more material than I have time to search. The result, I fear, is that I will have an under-cited paper. In a sense that won't be too bad because it's mostly statements of my opinion that will lack footnotes. On the other hand, opinions are predicated on facts, and I think it's a good practice to give pointers to those facts so that readers can evaluate whether they agree that they support the stated opinion.

The way things stand right now, though, I think readers will just have to trust me...

Anyway, this thing is due tomorrow - or for all practical purposes the end of today since I have different work to do tomorrow. I'll do the best I can on it and then hand it in, but hopefully someday I'll have the time to go over it again and clean it up some more. I'm writing on an important regulatory topic - network neutrality - and saying important things about it. But interestingly, I've written almost an entire paper on it, and yet never mentioned the term... I think that's ok, just an interesting point to note. Common carriage, however, has been well-hammered home.

Oh, and I've not mentioned a word about vampires either. Which you might suspect because I'm writing a paper on Internet regulation and not vampire regulation. Except you'd be amazed at how many telecom regulatory topics can be effectively analogized with vampires. Our professor was incredibly expert at doing so, and it was really quite educational...