Recent Highlights

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

  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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  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.”

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  Interdisciplinary collaboration focuses on freedom, power, control, security, openness and democracy

  Last year, during Admitted Students Weekend, Professor Jonathan Zittrain ’95 was slated to give a talk on cyberlaw. For Ona Balkus ’13, the topic was not high on her list. Yet she was surprised to find that this presentation “ended up being the session that I went home and told my family about and that got me really excited about starting law school,” says Balkus. This year, when the school offered iLaw, a crash course on cyberspace, she registered.

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  Zittrain appointed chair of FCC’s Open Internet Advisory Committee

  In late May, Harvard Law School Professor Jonathan Zittrain '95 was appointed chair of the Open Internet Advisory Committee. The committee was called for by the Federal Communications Commission to track and evaluate the effects of the FCC’s Open Internet rules and to provide recommendations to the FCC regarding policies and practices related to preserving the open Internet.

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  Harvard’s great teachers: Jonathan Zittrain (video)

  Jonathan Zittrain, professor of law in the faculty of Law and the Kennedy School of Government and professor of computer science in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, was featured as one of Harvard’s great teachers in a video series created to mark the 375th anniversary of the founding of Harvard College.

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  Zittrain, Wones to step into leadership roles for Harvard Law School Library

  Dean Martha Minow has announced that HLS Professor Jonathan Zittrain ’95 and HLS Library’s Assistant Director of Research, Curriculum and Publication Services, Suzanne Wones, will take over leadership of the Harvard Law School Library this summer, following the departure of Professor John G. Palfrey ’01 in July.

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  Berkman Center releases report on youth and digital media

  As youth increasingly turn to the Internet as a source of information, researchers, educators, parents, and policy-makers are faced with mounting challenges and opportunities. A new report from Harvard’s Youth and Media project at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society seeks to understand youths’ real experiences of online information quality.

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  Berkman Center and Pew Internet release first in-depth study of mobile giving

  A new study produced by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, in partnership with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Give Foundation, examines a new cohort of charitable givers—those who make donations via text message from their cellphones.

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  A Vast Wasteland Revisited (video)

  In 1961, Newton Minow – then Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission – delivered a landmark speech to the National Association of Broadcasters on “Television and the Public Interest,” in which he described television programming as a "vast wasteland" and advocated for public interest programming. He challenged his audience “to sit down in front of your own television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper…to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.” Fifty years– and innumerable advances in media communications – later, Minow visited Harvard Law School for a forum exploring the future of journalism and the role of the state in the construction of the public sphere.