Recent Highlights

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  Avoiding the digital 'flock': Zuckerman sees need for connectivity in a Web world that courts the narrow (video)

  In an age of fast-paced globalization, society does a great job moving people and products across borders, author Ethan Zuckerman said during a June 25 discussion sponsored by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, “but we’re less good at moving bits across borders.”

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  Zittrain delivers keynote at Harvard IT Summit

  Harvard Law School Professor Jonathan Zittrain '95 delivered the keynote speech at the recent Harvard IT Summit, devoting his lecture to the potential “end of .edu.” Zittrain is also a professor at Harvard Kennedy School, and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, as well as the co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

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  Legal Hackathon

  During the weekend of Feb. 22, at the first-ever Legal Hackathon, a group of 25 Harvard Law School students worked around the clock to confront the question of content-use policies for HarvardX, and what they may mean for Harvard University and the future of education.

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  Lessig remembers Swartz (video)

  Lawrence Lessig, director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, remembered the late Internet luminary and social activist Aaron Swartz during remarks that were part moving eulogy and part urgent call to curb “extremism in prosecuting computer laws.” Lessig addressed a capacity crowd in Austin Hall on Feb. 19 at Harvard Law School in a lecture titled “Aaron’s Laws: Law and Justice in a Digital Age.” The talk marked Lessig’s appointment as Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at the School.

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  Experts explore how social networks can influence behavior and decision-making (video)

  Scholars and social media experts convened at Harvard Law School Feb. 6 to examine the ways in which electronic interactive media can sway human decision-making and behavior. The conference, “Social Media and Behavioral Economics,” was sponsored by Harvard Law School's new Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy and created by the program’s director, Cass Sunstein ’78.

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  HLS debuts first online course

  Harvard Law School’s first ever online course launched Monday, opening up “Copyright,” a class taught by Law School professor William W. Fisher, III, to hundreds of people worldwide. HLS1x: “Copyright,” which is offered through the Harvard branch of the online learning platform edX, is closely modeled after the Law School course taught by Fisher since 1994.

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  HLS students help student startups, at Harvard and MIT

  The Harvard Law Entrepreneurship Project is the newest of 11 Student Practice Organizations at Harvard Law School and is providing free legal research and analysis for student-founded startups at Harvard and MIT.

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  Symposium at HLS marks launch of global network of interdisciplinary centers focused on the Internet and society

  On Dec. 6-8, 2012, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, together with seven international co-organizers, hosted a symposium  at Harvard Law School titled Internet-Driven Developments: Structural Changes and Tipping Points, convening representatives from Internet and society research centers spanning 5 continents and 22 countries.

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  A Theory of Connectivity: Gasser and Palfrey on the opportunities and pitfalls of our increasingly interconnected world

  The highly connected nature of today’s world has all sorts of benefits—but all sorts of potential costs as well, from loss of control of private data to a world financial system so intertwined that when one part of it falls, it’s hard to keep other parts from toppling along with it. In “Interop: The Promise and Perils of Highly Interconnected Systems,” John Palfrey ’01 and Urs Gasser LL.M. ’03 draw on their work at the HLS Berkman Center for Internet & Society to start developing a “normative theory identifying what we want out of all this connectivity.”