Internet Law Expert Lawrence Lessig To Lecture At Institute For Advanced Study

Lawrence Lessig, professor of law at Stanford University and authority on Internet law and constitutional law, will speak on "The Architecture of Innovation" on March 14 at 4:30 p.m. in Wolfensohn Hall on the campus of the Institute for Advanced Study. A reception will follow.

"The Internet has been a source of extraordinary innovation, both in the arts and in commerce," observes Lessig. "This innovation hangs upon the network's architecture, or alternatively, upon its 'code.' This architecture sets the 'net's policy, and continued innovation and creativity depend upon maintaining the same policy." In his talk, Lessig "will connect values that the Internet has evinced to this architecture, or code, and then demonstrate how these values are being threatened, as the architecture is changed. There is a politics in code, and our blindness to this politics will mean the loss of values protected by this code."

Lessig, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania with an M.A. from Trinity College, Cambridge, earned his J.D. in 1989 from Yale Law School. He clerked for Judge Richard Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit, and for Justice Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court. Professor at the University of Chicago Law School from 1991 to 1997, Lessig then joined the Harvard Law School faculty as Berkman Professor for Entrepreneurial Legal Studies. He was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in 1999-2000, after which he assumed his present position at Stanford.

His book, Code, and Other Laws of Cyberspace (Basic Books, 1999), has been called "a landmark publication" by one reviewer; another commented, "Lessig has the uncommon ability to sort through the endless spew of talk and news about the Internet to find what matters and why we should care."

The event is one of a series of public lectures sponsored by the Institute's School of Social Science during the academic year 2000-01 in connection with a year-long exploration of "Information Technology, New Media and the Social Sciences."