Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society

Harvard Law Professors Jonathan Zittrain ‘95 and Lawrence Lessig explored the role of journalists and information in the age of blogs, Twitter and Julian Assange, as part of a recent panel at the Aspen Ideas Festival.

A common lament of law students is that casebooks are expensive and heavy. Others say they are static and slow to evolve. Professor Jonathan Zittrain ’95 has set out to address both complaints.

On June 9 and 10, Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society hosted “Hyper-Public: A Symposium on Designing Privacy and Public Space in the Connected World.” The event united computer scientists with ethnographers, architects, historians, artists, and legal scholars in discussions about the line between public and private spaces in the digital world.

In a June 15 article in the Opinion section of The New York Times, Harvard Law School Professor Jonathan Zittrain ’95 discusses the current state of computer science education, and suggests an alternative approach to teaching that focuses more on the “bigger picture” than “rote work without much prospect for intellectual growth.”

Jonathan Zittrain, HLS professor of law and co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, has been appointed as the Federal Communications Commission’s Distinguished Scholar, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski announced May 31.

The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard helped shape the agenda of Rethink Music, a recent conference that brought together legal, business, and academic experts to discuss new business models for creating and distributing music.

Harvard Law School Professor Yochai Benkler ‘94 has received a Ford Foundation Visionaries Award, it was announced April 29. The award was created in recognition of the 75th Anniversary of the Ford Foundation to celebrate social innovators from a variety of fields.

In an open letter published recently in The New York Review of Books, Harvard Law School Professor Yochai Benkler ’94 and co-author Bruce Ackerman, professor at Yale Law School, detail the detention of Bradley Manning, a US soldier charged with providing government documents to Wikileaks, and call on President Obama and the Pentagon to document grounds for what the authors describe as “illegal and immoral” confinement.

At a recent lecture hosted by HLS Lambda and the Journal of Law & Technology, Harvard Law School’s Henry N. Ess Professor of Law John Palfrey discussed the latest legal and legislative attempts to address cyber-bullying—or, as Palfrey prefers to describe it, bullying in the digital era.

On March 14, the Library Journal announced 50 new inductees to their Movers & Shakers list, including John Palfrey ’01. Movers & Shakers is a distinguished annual award given to those who are shaping the future of libraries and communities across the United States.

Harvard Law Professor Yochai Benkler ’94 has released an article detailing U.S. government and news media censorship of WikiLeaks after the organization released the Afghan War Diary, the Iraq War Logs, and U.S. State department diplomatic cables in 2010. Among his key conclusions: The government overstated and overreacted to the WikiLeaks documents, and the mainstream news media followed suit by engaging in self-censorship. Benkler argues further that there is no sound Constitutional basis for a criminal prosecution of WikiLeaks or its leader, Julian Assange.

Professor John G. Palfrey ’01 was declared the winner of an interactive online debate on Internet democracy, hosted by The Economist from Feb. 23 to March 4.

Harvard Law School Professor Jonathan Zittrain appeared on the Mar. 9 edition of American Public Media’s Marketplace Tech Report to discuss the Cybersecurity and Internet Freedom Act of 2011, introduced last year by Senators Joe Lieberman, Susan Collins, and Thomas Carper.

This week, HLS Professors John G. Palfrey, Jonathan Zittrain, and HLS Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law Andrew K. Woods each weighed in on the Egyptian government's recent decision to block Internet access to prevent the use of social media outlets in light of escalating protests in the country. 

In a Jan. 31 article in the Opinion section of the New York Daily News online, HLS Professor John G. Palfrey addresses the issue of corporate responsibility in the wake of the Egyptian government’s recent Internet access lockdown to prevent protesters from organizing against President Hosni Mubarak’s regime.

In 2009, HLS Professor Yochai Benkler ’94 and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society were commissioned by the FCC to do a study on broadband deployment throughout the world.

In an opinion piece in the Room for Debate section of The New York Times, Harvard Law School Professor John Palfrey discusses whether the death of Tyler Clementi, a Rutgers student, calls for tougher laws against malicious acts online.

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University will conduct an independent, exploratory study analyzing the communication and decision-making processes of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the organization responsible for managing the internet's domain name system.

An online investigative journalist, working on a shoestring budget, is sued for libel. Where can he turn for legal help?

Harvard Law School Professor Jonathan Zittrain ’95, a leading scholar on the legal and policy issues surrounding the Internet, adds to his law school post a joint appointment to the faculty of the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) as Professor of Computer Science. Zittrain is a co-founder of the university’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.