Harvard Law School Professor Jonathan Zittrain ’95, the George Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School, professor of computer science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, was recently named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Zittrain joins some of the world’s most accomplished leaders from academia, business, public affairs, humanities, and the arts. The 237th class of members includes philanthropist and singer-songwriter John Legend, award-winning actress Carol Burnett, chairman of the board of Xerox Corporation Ursula Burns, mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani, immunologist James P. Allison, and writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
“It is an honor to welcome this new class of exceptional women and men as part of our distinguished membership,” said Don Randel, chair of the Academy’s Board of Directors. “Their talents and expertise will enrich the life of the Academy and strengthen our capacity to spread knowledge and understanding in service to the nation.”
“Jonathan is so deeply deserving of this honor,” said Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow. “He is a true public intellectual, with an incredible array of work in rapidly unfolding areas of law and technology and the evolving policy that surrounds it. He also has a deep commitment to making complex ideas accessible to scholars, students and the public, and to making information readily available to all who seek it though novel digitization efforts. Jonathan is a wonderful addition to Academy, and truly reflects its traditions of distinguished scholarship and civil dialogue.”
Zittrain is also vice dean for library and information resources at the Harvard Law School Library and co-founder and faculty director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. He was recently elected to the National Museum and Library Services Board, and to membership of the American Law Institute–the leading independent organization in the United States producing scholarly work to clarify, modernize, and improve the law.
The author of “The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It,” Zittrain focuses his research on battles for control of digital property and content, cryptography, algorithmic accountability, the roles of intermediaries within Internet architecture, human computing, and the useful and unobtrusive deployment of technology in education. At the Library, Zittrain’s work includes fostering perma.cc, a consortium of over 200 organizations committed to the distributed institutional preservation of organic Web materials linked from scholarly works and judicial opinions.
Zittrain is a member of the board of directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the board of advisors for Scientific American.
The Academy’s new class will be inducted at a ceremony on October 7, 2017, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, based in Cambridge, Mass., is one of the nation’s most prestigious honorary societies and a leading center for independent policy research. Members contribute to Academy publications and studies of science and technology policy, energy and global security, social policy and American institutions, the humanities and culture, and education.
Other members of the HLS faculty who have been selected as fellows in previous years, include: Lucian Bebchuk LL.M. ’80 S.J.D. ’84, Victor Brudney, Robert Clark ’72, Richard Fallon, Noah Feldman, Roger Fisher LL.B. ’48, Charles Fried, Mary Ann Glendon, Jack Goldsmith, Annette Gordon-Reed ’84, Charles Haar LL.B. ’48, Morton Horwitz LL.B. ’67, Vicki Jackson, Elena Kagan ’86, Benjamin Kaplan, Louis Kaplow ’81, Duncan Kennedy, Randall Kennedy, Michael Klarman, John F. Manning ’85, Daniel Meltzer ’75, Frank Michelman LL.B. ’60, Martha Minow, Robert Mnookin LL.B. ’68, Gerald L. Neuman ’80, Mark Roe ’75, Steven Shavell, William Stuntz , Cass Sunstein ’78, Laurence Tribe ’66, Mark Tushnet, Roberto Mangabeira Unger LL.M. ’70 S.J.D. ’76, Adrian Vermeule ’93, Elizabeth Warren, and David Wilkins ’80.