Essay Proposals

As pointed out to me today by Ashley, the course syllabus / schedule mentions an essay proposal. This is a chance for you to bounce your ideas off of us. You may not have a firm idea of what you want to write about at this stage, and that is fine. Even a general theme (e.g., surveillance, privacy in criminal cases) is enough to get you thinking about this exercise.

(Hopefully you will also be brainstorming a bit in the course of working on the mind map assignment)

For inspiration, I have a list of sample essay topics here. (We were supposed to have a few engineering students in this class, so some of the suggested projects are technical in nature). I would also take a look at the posts on recent symposia, some of which will contain up-to-date papers.

Once you find a compelling topic, it is useful to see what has been published on it. You can search the online library catalogue, SSRN, Google Scholar and other databases. Papers that haven't been published yet often appear in conferences first. Those are more difficult to access, particularly the best conference in the field (the Privacy Law Scholars Conference, which is invite-only).

As for what you have to hand in:

Format:

• one page, 12 point font, single spaced.

Content:

• Header, with your name (important, as some of you forgot this on your memos), the date, the course number and title.
• Topic. Outline the general subject area (e.g., privacy and technology), as well as the topic of interest (e.g., home genetic testing kits). You do not have to have a thesis statement, but it helps to have an idea of what you find interesting.
• Rationale: a paragraph on why you think this is an interesting topic worthy of your time and effort. Why did you choose this, and why should people be interested in it?
• Scope: a sentence or two on how you will make sure that your treatment is suitable for a term paper. Being overly ambitious is a surefire way of making this term uncomfortable.
• Previous Treatment: has anyone written on this topic in the past? If so, how will your paper differ?
• Sample References: give 4-10 sample references pertaining to your topic. You can grab these from the online York library catalogue.

Once you hand this in, we will arrange a time to chat with you (e.g., in class, after class, skype, voice) about your proposed topic. We want to make sure that your paper is interesting to you, feasible, and properly scoped.