20 June 2005

Another Matter of Time

No Grokster or Brand X today, so I suppose I can let the earlier entry today be my IP contribution to the blawgosphere for the day.

Somewhat amusingly, this really points out the rapid pace of modern law practice. When I was in law school in the early 1990s, I began downloading the day's Supreme Court opinions and taking them to professors (as a graduate assistant, I was helping run the law school's computer system). At that time, I was using Cornell's system, which was by far the fastest. That meant that I could give Ron Rotunda the syllabus for a free-speech decision in time for his noon (1pm Eastern) Con Law II class, coincidentally on the day that concept was being discussed. By the middle of my second year, this was an almost-expected "vulture watch": I'd be sitting on the connection, like Snoopy, at about 10:30 or 10:45 (90 minutes after announcement) to pull the opinions. And now, we're all impatient because as I write this, the Court is still on the bench, we know what opinions are being released, but the text isn't available on the Internet quite yet (I'd guess another 20 minutes or so).

The implications of this impatience for my critique of Stallman's drivel is left as an exercise for the student.