In Search of Jefferson's Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace
David Post
Tuesday, March 17, 5:00 pm
Austin East Classroom, Austin Hall, Harvard Law School (Map)
Free and Open to the Public (See who is coming on Facebook)
This event will be webcast live at 5:00PM ET.
Who governs the Internet, and how? What kind of law does it have, what kind of law should it have, and who will make that law? David G. Post will be discussing these questions and his recently-published book, In Search of Jefferson's Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace (Oxford), which looks at these questions through Jefferson's eyes, re-creating Jefferson’s encyclopedia of the New World ("Notes on the State of Virginia," 1786), but this time for cyberspace. What kind of a “place” is it? How does it work? How did it grow as fast as it did? What kind of new things, and what kind of old things, are out there? How did they get there, and how do they get from one place to another? What kinds of communities form there? What principles should guide our law-making efforts, and the design of our law-making institutions, in a global place like this? (And along the way, he tries to figure out why Jefferson had a moose shipped to him in Paris while he was serving as US minister to France and mounted in the lobby of his residence. What was he up to?)
What people are saying about the book...
“Brilliant - and a joy to read. The book of a career: sweeping in scope, without dropping a stitch of detail.” -Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and Berkman Center Co-founder
"The book is an entertaining and thoughtful discussion of the intellectual struggles at the founding of the American republic, and how they parallel dilemmas about the nature of the Internet." -Harry Lewis, Berkman Fellow and former Dean of Harvard College
About David
David G. Post is currently the Stern Professor of Law at the Beasley School of Law at Temple University, where he teaches intellectual property law and the law of cyberspace. He is also a Fellow at the Institute for Information Law and Policy at New York Law School, an Adjunct Scholar at the Cato Institute, and a contributor to the Volokh Conspiracy blog. He received a Ph.D. in physical anthropology and taught in the Anthropology Department at Columbia University before attending Georgetown Law Center, from which he graduated summa cum laude in 1986. After clerking with then-Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, he spent 6 years at the Washington D.C. law firm of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering, after which he then clerked again for Justice Ginsburg during her first term at the Supreme Court (1993-94), before joining the faculty of the Georgetown University Law Center (1994 – 1997) and then Temple University Law School (1997 – present). He is the author of In Search of Jefferson’s Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace (Oxford, 2009), as well as Cyberlaw: Problems of Policy and Jurisprudence in the Information Age (West, 2007) (co-authored with Paul Schiff Berman and Patricia Bellia), and numerous scholarly articles on intellectual property, the law of cyberspace, and complexity theory. He has been a regular columnist for the American Lawyer and InformationWeek, a commentator on the Lehrer News Hour, Court TV’s Supreme Court Preview, NPR’s All Things Considered, BBC’s World, and recently was featured in the PBS documentary The Supreme Court. His writings can be accessed online at http://www.davidpost.com or http://jeffersonsmoose.org