Scoping Paper

The purpose of the scoping paper is to ensure that you're on the right track. We'll give you feedback on direction, scope, e.g., ultimate outcome, and references.

What should be in the paper when you turn it in:

• A detailed description of your goal and your argument
• Two semi-independent sections, on the legal aspects and on the technological aspects
• Primary references: major cases, statutes, technologies
• If you're going to write and run any code, any specific resources you need beyond your own laptops

Don't worry about:

• Formatting
• Detailed explanations of the cases, statutes, or technologies

For example, suppose you were writing a paper on encryption policy. Are you looking at devices or communications? International or domestic? What is your legal focus? The First Amendment issues? The Fourth Amendment issues? The All Writs Act? The legality of hacking instead?  The Fourth Amendment issues? What cases do you cite? If you're looking at the First Amendment, you would need to cite Bernstein, Junger, and Corley, at a minimum. For the Fourth Amendment issues, depending on your argument, you’d probably want to cite Kyllo, Carpenter, and cases discussing reasonableness. You may have to reach back to general warrants during the colonial period. The technical aspects might include the Clipper chip, lawful hacking, mobile forensic tools, how protections on devices actually work, etc.

We're looking for about 2000 words. No, we're not going to count. But we need to see enough to be able to give you proper feedback.

IMPORTANT: Because the primary purpose of this assignment is to let us give you feedback, a low grade indicates that your project is not properly scoped: too big, too small, too vague, etc. Accordingly, we will accept revised versions if they're turned in to us within a week.