6.805/STS085 Sample brief

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Fall Semester, 2007

MIT 6.805/STS085: Ethics and Law on the Electronic Frontier

Pre-semester assignment

Due by 5PM on Wednesday, September 5. No one will be admitted to the class without having completed the assignment.

Send your assignments by email to 6.805-staff@mit.edu. For this assignment, you can use any format that is convenient for you, and you should email the answer to us directly. Future writing assignments will be submitted via the writing rotisserie.

Briefing cases

The purpose of this assignment is for you to get some exposure to the legal technique of briefing a case, and also for you to delve into Reno v. ACLU, a landmark of First Amendment jurisprudence involving the Internet. This case will be a major topic of discussion at our first class, on September 6, so you will need to be familiar with it.

Part 1: Briefing Cubby v. Compuserve

Cubby v. Compuserve is an an important early case dealing with the legal standards governing the liability of Internet Service Providers for defamation. If you don't know the meaning of legal terms like "liability" and "defamation" you should look them up. www.legal-definitions.com can be a useful resource here.

Read the explanation of how to brief a case that we've provided, along with the sample brief of Cubby. Pay attention to the specific sections that a brief must include.

Now read the full opinion in Cubby. Is the brief a useful guideline to reading the opinion? Think about how you could have started with the opinion and produced the brief.

Part 2: Briefing Reno v. ACLU

Read the Supreme Court's opinion in Reno v. ACLU, 521 U.S. 844 (1997). Reno is the first case in which the United States Supreme Court considered how the First Amendment would apply to speech on the Internet. This case lays the groundwork for our semester. It introduces us to a particular style of reasoning used in the legal system and provides an overview of how the US law has wrestled with the application of long-standing legal rules in the new decentralized communications and information medium of the Internet and the World Wide Web.

Write a case brief Reno v. ACLU following the guidelines and example in the linked document. Your brief should be no more than 1 page single-spaced.

You can find the case at a http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/96-511.ZO.html (majority opinion) and http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/96-511.ZX.html (concurring opinion and partial dissent)

You can find some background on Reno and the Communications Decency Act in the 6.805 archive on The Internet Censorship Saga: 1994-1997. But you should not need this in order to brief the case.