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The Information Society Project at Yale Law School
This electronic Journal, in both form and substance, is evidence of the central role telecommunications technologies have come to play in every aspect of our public and private lives. We perceive ourselves to be, and we are, living in an era of tremendous change. It is almost impossible to pick up a magazine or browse the bookstores without reading of the "Cyber-Revolution" or the "Heralding of the Information Society." In 1997 Yale Law School created the Information Society Project (ISP) to study the dramatic evolution of telecommunications, mass media and virtual media and their impact on law and on democracy. The ISP, an intellectual center committed to the preservation and promotion of democratic values, focuses on the appropriate role of law in a competitive telecommunications environment and a global Information Society. Through teaching and research, lectures and conferences, the ISP examines the future of law and the processes by which legal rules and social norms are created in a digital - and sometimes virtual - world without boundaries.
Yale Law School has a long tradition of advanced research on the interrelationship between society and legal endeavor and has always striven to adapt the teaching of law and legal scholarship to social change. The Information Society Project, in addition to serving as a home for legal research, a center for policy advocacy, and a forum for bringing together important figures in the information industries with those in the information academy, will be a training-ground for a new generation of international cyber-literate legal scholars. The new program at Yale complements offerings from cyberlaw centers at Harvard and Berkeley.
The Project, led by Knight Professor of Constitutional Law, J.M. Balkin, sponsors the work of two post-graduate fellows whose research includes topics in democratic theory, intellectual property, comparative, constitutional and regulatory law as well as on the law and economics of the Internet. The CyberLaw Roundtable, in conjunction with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a well-known public interest group promoting cyber-rights and electronic civil liberties, brings together political advocates with law students in monthly seminars. Together with its affiliated student organization, the Yale Law and Technology Society, the ISP invites speakers such as former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt, Patent Commissioner Bruce Lehman and Professor Paul Resnick, one of the designers of the PICS filtering standard which is at the center of the debate over filtering indecent speech on the Internet.