Legal Commentary

I have a confession to make.  I am addicted to the Internet.  Not just any Internet, mind you.  Internet of the high-speed kind.  I've been in France for over three weeks now, and I'm suffering serious withdrawal symptoms, despite the fact that I have both laptop and iPad in tow.  For the first week of the trip, my hotel had no Internet access whatsoever, so I was reduced to going to McDonald's for free WiFi and blaming it on the limited culinary horizons of my offspring.  For the last two weeks, I have had a wired connection in my hotel room, but it periodically goes down, leading to bouts of abject despair (and cursing).  What DID I do with my time before I obsessively checked my email four to six times a day? before I scoured four to ten different news sources per day?  before I thought I needed to keep up with law blogs and literary blogs and aldaily.com?  What DID I do when I wasn't expected to respond to every student or colleague within the hour?  How did I prepare for class when I couldn't access Westlaw or Google at a moment's notice?  [This week, I resorted to using copies of Prosser (a.k.a. the God of Torts) and Morris on Torts that are at least twenty years old to prepare for class.  I haven't done that in years.]  And what did I do when I didn't feel obliged to have an opinion on every important legal development within my area of expertise within a few days? 

The truth is that the lack of 24-hour, high-speed Internet access has made me realize how much time I waste online.  I'm an academic rather than a journalist because it is a better fit with my skill set, and it is sometimes counterproductive for me to keep up with every little minor development in my various teaching and research areas on a daily or even weekly basis.  I doubt if I can retain this insight when I once again have ready access to my addiction, but it is at least worth trying.