Harvard Law School Professor of Practice Urs Gasser LL.M. ’03 is among the twenty-five distinguished scholars and internationally recognized experts appointed to the Global Commission on Internet Governance’s (GCIG) new Research Advisory Network (RAN).
The Global Commission, a two-year initiative launched in January 2014, was created to advance a strategic vision for the future of Internet governance. Two independent global think tanks, the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) and Chatham House, have partnered to support the initiative, which will be chaired by Sweden’s Foreign Minister Carl Bildt.
The Research Advisory Network will assist in identifying and prioritizing Internet governance and Internet policy related issues within the commission’s mandate. Members of the RAN will provide expert briefings to the members of the commission and conduct research and analysis for the commission’s preparatory work and final report.
Gasser is the executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and a professor of practice at Harvard Law School. Gasser’s research and teaching activities focus on information law, policy, and society issues.
In addition to teaching at HLS, Gasser is a visiting professor at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland and he teaches at the Fudan University School of Management in China. Gasser also serves as a trustee on the board of the NEXA Center for Internet & Society at the University of Torino and on the board of the Research Center for Information Law at the University of St. Gallen.
He has written and edited several books, and published more than 100 articles in professional journals. He is the co-author, with John Palfrey ’01, of “Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives” and “Interop: The Promise and Perils of Highly Interconnected Systems.”
Before returning to the Berkman Center as executive director in 2009, Gasser served as associate professor of law at the University of St. Gallen, where he was faculty director of the Research Center for Information Law, and as a visiting professor at KEIO University in Japan. From 2002-2005, Gasser served as a resident fellow at the Berkman Center, and was appointed Faculty Fellow in 2005. During these years, he was the lead research fellow on the Digital Media Project, a multi-disciplinary research project aimed at exploring the transition from offline/analog to online/digital media. He also initiated and chaired the Harvard-Yale-Cyberscholar Working Group, and was a visiting researcher at Harvard Law School in the 2003/04 academic year.
He graduated from the University of St. Gallen (S.J.D. 2001, J.D. 1997) and Harvard Law School (LL.M. ‘03) and received several academic awards and prizes for his research, including Harvard’s Landon H. Gammon Fellowship for academic excellence and the “Walther Hug-Preis Schweiz”, a prize for the best doctoral theses in law nationwide, among others.