Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society

As Harvard Law students across the world logged onto Zoom this fall to connect to their professors and peers, Sidharth Chauhan LL.M. ’21 took virtual education a step further.

It’s a scene we unfortunately see too often now: A white woman pulls out her phone to call the police to patrol Black people in public spaces. They become memes, the kind that are studied by Apryl Williams, a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.

As the 2020 Tanner Lecturer on Human Values at Clare Hall, Cambridge, Harvard Law Professor Jonathan Zittrain explores the clash of free speech and public health online.

Harvard Law Professor Ruth Okediji believes recent events can reinvigorate American democracy and serve as a lesson for the world.

Harvard Law experts Yochai Benkler and evelyn douek weigh in on the suspension of President Trump’s social media accounts and potential First Amendment implications.

The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society researchers Yochai Benkler and Robert Faris document how polarized media in the United States shape political discourse and the 2020 election.

“The Connected Parent,” a new book by John Palfrey ’01 and Urs Gasser LL.M. ’03  is a practical guide for addressing concerns brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic and navigating an increasingly digital world.

Ahead of the 2020 presidential election in the United States, experts from the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society convened to discuss how platforms are approaching mis- and disinformation and what they can improve going forward.

In an effort to combat multiple potential vectors of attack on the 2020 U.S. election, two Berkman Klein Center affiliates have published a package of “tabletop exercises,” freely available to decisionmakers and the public to simulate realistic scenarios in which disinformation threatens to disrupt the 2020 election.

In the “good old days” of cybersecurity risk, we only had to worry about being hacked or downloading malware. But the stakes have ramped up considerably in the past decade, say Berkman Klein directors James Mickens and Jonathan Zittrain.

A new report from Harvard Law School Professor Yochai Benkler ’94 and a team of researchers from the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society shows that the mail-in voting fraud disinformation campaign—intentionally spreading false information in order to deceive—is largely led by political elites and the mass media.

As William Alford completes his tenure, Mark Wu assumes vice deanship of the Graduate Program and International Legal Studies at HLS.

After 18 years as its faculty director, Professor William P. Alford ’77 completed his tenure as vice dean for the Graduate Program and International Legal Studies at Harvard Law School on June 30.

Mark Wu, the Henry L. Stimson Professor at Harvard Law School, was recently appointed the new vice dean for the Graduate Program and International Legal Studies. He replaces William Alford, who served in the role for the past 18 years. 

“Confused,” “frustrating,” “fragmented,” “acute,” and “a reckoning” were just some of the ways three health care experts described the U.S. response to the coronavirus pandemic during a recent Berkman Klein virtual discussion.

In her Last Lecture, Ruth Okediji encouraged the graduating class to cultivate the courage to try something new.

The 2020 Last Lecture Series is an HLS tradition where selected faculty members impart insight, advice, and final words of wisdom to the graduating class. Speakers this year included Dehlia Umunna, Daphna Renan, Ruth Okediji, and Naz Modirzadeh.

The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University is currently taking the lead in the effort to explore the ways data can be mined to increase understanding of COVID-19 and to fight it more efficiently.

It was 1999 and the dot-com bubble was about to burst. Corporations were scrambling to address new legal challenges online. Napster was testing the music industry. And at Harvard Law School, the Berkman Klein Center was creating a clinical teaching program specializing in cyberlaw.

Kendra Albert ’16, former student and current clinical instructor in Berkman Klein Center's Cyberlaw Clinic talks about their takeaways from that experience, their current work, and what they’re the proudest of in their time there.

Rebecca Tushnet, the inaugural Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment and a director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary's Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, on Feb. 11, on “The Digital Millennium Copyright Act at 22: What is it, why was it enacted, and where are we now?”