More Work on my Outline

I proceed here on the good advice of my dean, Elena Kagan to face my teaching to the future. I agreed with Andy Kaufman,, our inside dean at hls, to teach Internet Law next year. That obligation looks to September 2006. Zittrain will offer his take on Internet Law in our January Winter semester. I am eager to be his student, and perhaps he mine.

Come January 3, 2006, Zittrain and i open our internet school. We start with the idea that our three week winter semester is like camp and we are camp directors. Welcome to cyber school. We would like our students to engage with us in an intense and absorbing learning and teaching experience during the three weeks that is ours.

I start each day with light calesthenics, breathing and stretching and such, at 8:30 a.m., all welcome to come, Evidence class begins sharp at nine and runs til noon. Z teaches Internet Law starting at 2 p.m. I hope he will allow me to attend his class, blogging all the way.

Cyberspace is a rhetorical place, virtual, made of message. Internet is the wiring of cyberspace. Internet Law has so far been conceived as the law that affects the routing of message in the space. But focus first on the space itself and the concept of message. What new capacities does this meta space bring? How will we learn and teach and create in it? What new forms of legal and social organization with this new environment permit to evolve and thrive? What will grow, what will die.

Both Z and i are forming our classes into groups. We’ll need two groups to help us plan and execute our meta plan to generate group activity so engaging that HLS students will actually dance. Becca, my daughter, my first child, HLS ’01

doubts that we can do it. Becca produces video and web and other delights with Wayne&Wax. Wayne’s my son-in-law.

Thursdays from eleven til noon we will be webcasting, connecting if we can with Kingston and London and who knows where else to consider issues raised by the case of Jah Cure and the plight of the victim, a.k.a. Susan Fergeson.

Fridays we play poker. Zittrain plays what many consider to be the best poker on the law school faculty in games of dealer’s choice. What is his skill? How would you describe it? Nick Marshall, Wayne’s little brother, is the best i’ve seen up close at Texas Hold’em.. I’ve a poker table in my house. Friday nights the game, Satellite games to reach the head table. We offer help for beginners and comfort for experts – come play.

We have broadband in our school, in our classrooms, in our workgroups, in our hands. We have WIKI and IM and GOOGLE and iCOMMONS and a digital revolution at our fingertips. We have the capacity to organize ourselves to do and to produce something extraordinary. We can identify our common interests and pool our resources in order to satisfy them. We can identify our common goals and pool our resources in order to accomplish them.

I want to speak on the first day to all who have the choice to add or drop, which is all of you. With my friend and colleague Burt Neuborn at NYU i teach Evidence without emphasis on the test of the rules, believing as does Burt that such focus misleads you to thinking Evidence Law is about textual interpretation of rules. We teach the principles beneath. We look to you to learn and understand how the fundamental principles of evidence and proof are expressed in code. We seek to train you to be programmers of the law, not its pawns. Code is Law. Law is Code. The concept is one and its reflection.

security in the net, law’s mission to create an environment in which society and economy can flourish; human rights in the net

organization of power in the world
the net itself a subject of study
principles behind the rules, how the rules reflrct them