Jonathan Zittrain

When Lawrence Lessig ended his issue-oriented quest for the Democratic Party’s nomination in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, he vowed to continue his campaign to reform election finance practices and reduce the influence of money in politics. “The fight is not over,” said Lessig, the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School, during a conversation with his colleague Jonathan Zittrain about the lessons learned while campaigning for election finance reform...“Money has corrupted our political process,” said Lessig. “They [in Congress] focus too much on the tiny slice, 1 percent, who are funding elections. In the current election cycle, 158 families have given half the money to candidates. That’s a banana republic democracy, that’s not an American democracy.”

A majority of Passcode Influencers said that Europeans should be allowed to sue in US courts if their personal data is misused. A new data-sharing agreement is currently in the works between the US and European Union, after the European Court of Justice struck down a the 15-year-old Safe Harbor agreement allowing companies to transfer data across the Atlantic....“If data is indeed being misused, there should be a remedy. What the question doesn’t ask is what should count as misuse. But there’s no reason to offer differing protections here based on the citizenship of the person whose data a company is handling,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard law professor. “And protection irrespective of country of origin is not only the right thing to do. It also gives US companies an important competitive advantage.”

Sometime in the past 20 years, people soured on email. Culturally, it went from delightful to burdensome, a shift that’s reflected in the very language of the inbox. In the 1990s, AOL would gleefully announce, “You’ve got mail!” Today, Gmail celebrates the opposite: “No new mail!” So what happened to email? What happened to us? These are some of the questions that come up in the new technology podcast Codebreaker, the first season of which is fixated on the question, “Is it evil?”...“Email is the last great unowned technology,” said the Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain in the first episode of Codebreaker, “and by unowned I mean there is no CEO of email... it’s just a shared hallucination that works.”

If you aren’t a lawyer, you may be surprised to learn that much of the country’s legal rulings aren’t freely accessible to the public, despite the crucial role many played in the shaping and organization of American society. While the documents are part of the public domain, a byzantine patchwork of outdated government interfaces and expensive paywalls restrict access to them. Now, as part of an ambitious multiyear project, Harvard University is liberating that information. Home to the country’s most comprehensive collection of U.S. case law, second only to the Library of Congress, Harvard is partnering with technology startup Ravel Law to digitize its legal library — more than 200 years’ worth of cases — making it fully and freely searchable...“Not only will the law become accessible, but all sorts of interesting things might be done with it as a database,” Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard law professor and director of the law library, told BuzzFeed News. “To me it’s kind of like seeing Google Maps for the first time after having only used MapQuest,” he said, referring to new, possible insights a user might glean from analyzing and visualizing case law.

Last week, Harvard Law School announced its “Free the Law” project, a program aimed at making one of the world’s largest collections of United States case law entirely free, digitized and publicly accessible. Harvard is partnering with Ravel Law, an online legal search platform, to scan a total of 40,000 books and distribute the documents on the internet by 2017. This is a momentous victory for those in favor of more widely accessible information. Though the information will not be fully publicly available until 2023, the movement to provide free and comprehensive legal documents is cause enough to celebrate. As Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law at Harvard, put it: “Libraries were founded as an engine for the democratization of knowledge … The materials in the [Harvard] library’s collection tell a story that goes back to the founding of America, and we’re proud to preserve and share that story.” But Harvard should not be the only university to make important and historical information accessible.

By mid-2017, Harvard Law School’s entire collection of United States case law will be available for public search through a new online legal platform, Ravel Law, which will provide the contents of its database for bulk access for free over the next eight years. While case law documents are nominally within the public realm, actually accessing them often requires paying an intermediary like LexisNexis or Westlaw. “What comes from a judge's quill should be freely available to all,” Jonathan L. Zittrain, the director of the Law School library, wrote in an email. “This project is a step along an overdue path towards making the law worldwide freely available and searchable through as many means as there are games in an app store.”

Harvard Law School announced today that, with the support of Ravel Law, a legal research and analytics platform, it is digitizing its entire collection of U.S. case law, one of the largest collections of legal materials in the world, and will make the collection available online, for free, to anyone with an Internet connection. The “Free the Law” initiative will provide open, wide-ranging access to American case law for the first time in U.S. history. “Driving this effort is a shared belief that the law should be free and open to all,” said Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow...“Libraries were founded as an engine for the democratization of knowledge, and the digitization of Harvard Law School’s collection of U.S. case law is a tremendous step forward in making legal information open and easily accessible to the public,” said Jonathan Zittrain, the George Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School and vice dean for library and information resources.

Shelves of law books are an august symbol of legal practice, and no place, save the Library of Congress, can match the collection at Harvard’s Law School Library. Its trove includes nearly every state, federal, territorial and tribal judicial decision since colonial times — a priceless potential resource for everyone from legal scholars to defense lawyers trying to challenge a criminal conviction. Now, in a digital-age sacrifice intended to serve grand intentions, the Harvard librarians are slicing off the spines of all but the rarest volumes and feeding some 40 million pages through a high-speed scanner. They are taking this once unthinkable step to create a complete, searchable database of American case law that will be offered free on the Internet, allowing instant retrieval of vital records that usually must be paid for...“Improving access to justice is a priority,” said Martha Minow, dean of Harvard Law School, explaining why Harvard has embarked on the project. “We feel an obligation and an opportunity here to open up our resources to the public.”...Under the agreement with Harvard, the entire underlying database, not just limited search results, will be shared with nonprofit organizations and scholars that wish to develop specialized applications. Ravel and Harvard will withhold the database from other commercial groups for eight years. After that, it will be available to anyone for any purpose, said Jonathan L. Zittrain, a Harvard Law professor and director of the law library.

After four years of false starts and strife over privacy protections, the Senate passed legislation by a vote of 74 to 21 on Tuesday that would help companies battle a daily onslaught of cyberattacks. But there is one problem with the legislation, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, or CISA: In the years that Congress was debating it, computer attackers have grown so much more sophisticated — in many cases, backed by state sponsors from Shanghai to Tehran — that the central feature of the legislation, agreements allowing companies and the government to share information, seems almost quaint...“I think the fruits of detecting signatures and patterns of broad attacks are already picked,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard law professor. “The biggest threats,” he said, are far more customized, “with elements of social engineering or betrayal of an employee with access to data or code.”

Forget about trying to get any work done on Thursday: the Internet Cat Video Festival is returning to Boston. The festival comes to the Berklee Performance Center for the second straight year to showcase a collection of amusing and adorable cat clips. ... The event is produced by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. This year’s videos were curated by Will Braden, creator of the popular Henri le Chat Noir videos on YouTube. Harvard professor Jonathan Zittrain will serve as the event’s emcee. “Why did I agree to do this? Because it’s a fun thing,” says Zittrain, an admitted dog owner who specializes in cyber law and policy. “Whatever we’re worried about, there are always cat videos to watch. And I’m grateful for that.”

Harvard Law School raised $241 million of its $305 million of its goal during the quiet phase of its capital campaign, which launched with fanfare on Friday evening. Titled the “Campaign for the Third Century,” the fundraising effort will focus on clinical education and financial aid for students. The Law School recently finished a capital campaign in 2008, when it raised $476 million, surpassing its $400 million goal. Because of the proximity to its last fundraising drive, the Law School is the last of Harvard’s schools to launch its part of the University-wide Harvard Campaign, which kicked off publicly in 2013 and seeks to raise $6.5 billion.    

When the Berklee Performance Center hosted the Internet Cat Video Festival for the first time last year, people were clawing to get in so they could watch a 70-minute reel of cat footage from the Web. Thankfully, for those who didn’t make it inside, there’s now a second chance to enjoy the feline film phenomenon. On Oct. 29, Berklee is hosting the festival for the second time...To top it all off, Harvard University law professor Jonathan Zittrain will emcee the event. Zittrain is an expert in all things Internet and the faculty director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. But don’t expect him to talk about the legalities of sharing cat videos — his mind will be focused on entertainment.

In light of the Volkswagen scandal, the US should revise copyright laws so that people can legally tinker with automotive software, a majority of Passcode Influencers said....“‘Tinker’ is a tricky word -- automobiles are kinetic creatures, and no one wants to have even well-intentioned hackers applying patches that would lead to safety issues. But there’s not much security through obscurity, and it’s important and helpful for technically-inclined people to be able to review and understand the code on which their cars run, just as they’re entitled to try to take apart the physical pieces. In the longer term, we can devise ways to allow tinkerers to modify the code on their automobiles while being accountable should something go terribly awry.” – Jonathan Zittrain

...Across Harvard, faculty members, students, and researchers are examining those questions, engaging the world’s latest information revolution, the one in “big data.”...Jonathan Zittrain, the George Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School and Harvard Kennedy School, believes that big data — and the algorithms developed to make sense of it — are both exciting and potentially worrisome at the same time, and that thought should be given to who uses it and how...Zittrain, who is also director and faculty chair of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and is a professor of computer science at the Harvard Paulson School, said the intersection of big data, artificial intelligence, and our always-on world has created interesting moral, ethical, and potentially legal issues. And he believes that the relatively neutral ground of universities is a good place to sort that out.

Sure, it’s annoying when you click on a link and get that “404” message or an automatic redirect to the homepage. But when it comes to legal research, dead links aren’t just annoying; they can undermine the entire premise of an opinion, article or treatise. Hoping to end this type of “link rot,” Harvard University Law School came up with Perma.cc—an archival tool that allows users to submit their links to Harvard’s library in order to be permanently preserved. The idea was the brainchild of Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of international law who became director of the Harvard Law Library two years ago...In 2013 the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, under the directorship of Kim Dulin, launched Perma based on Zittrain’s proposal...According to project manager Adam Ziegler, Perma is primarily designed as a voluntary service for opinion or article writers to create a preserved record of their work.

...This year’s list of Legal Rebels continues our tradition of celebrating those men and women who are remaking their corners of the legal profession–finding new ways to practice law, represent their clients, adjudicate matters and train the next generation. This year’s Rebels–nominated by our readers and staff–are a diverse group tackling many different challenges, but all using smarts and commitment to accomplish goals for practitioners and clients...Sure, it’s annoying when you click on a link and get that “404” message or an automatic redirect to the homepage. But when it comes to legal research, dead links aren’t just annoying; they can undermine the entire premise of an opinion, article or treatise. Hoping to end this type of “link rot,” Harvard University Law School came up with Perma.cc—an archival tool that allows users to submit their links to Harvard’s library to be permanently preserved. The idea was the brainchild of Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of international law who became director of the Harvard Law School Library two years ago.