Ranting to /dev/null

Not making progress

I've spent the past two days really digging in to primary documents for a paper I'm writing as a directed reading. I've gotten a lot of work done; locating 18th-century state session laws is a huge pain, especially when they aren't cited properly. But I managed to locate everything I was looking for, and got through most of the 19th-century treatises I found.

The problem? My thesis is more or less shot, because an idea I didn't think showed up until 1954 in Mazer v. Stein is at least tangentially present in New England state laws as early as 1783, and explicitly present by 1842 (in Britain anyways).

Damn.