The Academic Paper of Awesomeness

The day of reckoning draws dearer, our papers are due tonight! I guess I could've posted about my progress earlier in the week, but as I'm sure we can all attest to, this week has been insane!! Either way I would very much appreciate your input, even at the eleventh hour.

As I'm sure some of you may have already inferred by my comments about it in class, (and I apologize if they've gotten annoying, I just really like this topic) my academic paper is about the political ramifications of applying print to legal texts.

 Here's my intro paragraph:

"The American Revolution, the English Civil War, and the French and Russian Revolutions, all are examples of unprecedented political and social change that occurred after a particularly pivotal event in history – then invention of the printing press. The application of printing to the law led to greater political change than any other singular event in history. This primarily brought about a change in the way people communicated legal knowledge, and thereby how they communicated their ideas on the subject. There are two main results of printed law that directly caused this change: greater public access to uniform legal decisions and court proceedings, and a more public discourse regarding law and its functions leading to the wide dissemination of political ideas. While some may argue that the transition from spoken to written law or some other turning point in history was more groundbreaking in its nature, it’s quite apparent that the transition from oral and written legal traditions to the printed word had an effect with far greater scope than those of other developments."


In case you didn't catch it, my thesis is, "The application of printing to the law led to greater political change than any other singular event in history." I think it's simple, provocative, and gets my point across. 

What are your thoughts? Did this really lead to more political change than ANY other single event in history? The only one I could think of was possibly The American Revolution, which I believe depended a lot on print knowledge in the first place. I think it's a pretty divisive statement, so I'm sure there will be someone who disagrees with me. Thanks in advance for your input!

Printing the Word of Law

For my annotated bibliography post I decided to research how the advent of printing dramatically changed the nature of written law. Although law codes had been written in various forms for thousands of years, the transition to print as the medium for this very important knowledge would usher in a new era of uniformity, and challenge conventional authority, changing the way law is perceived in our society. Keep reading to find out more!