Law of the Horse was a term used in the mid-1990s to define the state of cyberlaw during the nascent years of the Internet.
The term first gained prominence in a 1996 cyberlaw conference presentation by Judge Frank H. Easterbrook of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Easterbrook, who was also on the faculty of the University of Chicago, later published his presentation in the University of Chicago Legal Forum as "Cyberspace and the Law of the Horse", in which he argued against the notion of defining cyberlaw as a unique section of legal studies and litigation. [1] Though Easterbrook credited Karl Llewellyn for coining the expression "law of the horse," Easterbrook's analysis was prompted by Gerhard Casper's arguments against specialized or niche legal studies. In effect, Easterbrook applied Casper's discussion of the law of the horse to cyberlaw:
...the best way to learn the law applicable to specialized endeavors is to study general rules. Lots of cases deal with sales of horses; others deal with people kicked by horses; still more deal with the licensing and racing of horses, or with the care veterinarians give to horses, or with prizes at horse shows. Any effort to collect these strands into a course on 'The Law of the Horse' is doomed to be shallow and to miss unifying principles. [2]
Easterbrook's theory was challenged by Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Harvard Law School, in a 1999 article "The Law of the Horse: What Cyberlaw Might Teach." [3] Lessig's article, which was first presented at the Boston University Law School Faculty Workshop, argued that legal perceptions and rules would need to evolve as the cyberspace environment developed and expanded. [4] [5]
Openlaw is a project at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School aimed at releasing case arguments under a copyleft license, in order to encourage public suggestions for improvement.
Lester Lawrence "Larry" Lessig III is an American legal scholar and political activist. He is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the former director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. He is the founder of Creative Commons and of Equal Citizens. Lessig was a candidate for the Democratic Party's nomination for president of the United States in the 2016 U.S. presidential election but withdrew before the primaries.
Jonathan L. Zittrain is an American professor of Internet law and the George Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School. He is also a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, a professor of computer science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and co-founder and director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. Previously, Zittrain was Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute of the University of Oxford and visiting professor at the New York University School of Law and Stanford Law School. He is the author of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It as well as co-editor of the books, Access Denied, Access Controlled, and Access Contested.
The University of Chicago Law School is the law school of the University of Chicago, a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. It employs more than 180 full-time and part-time faculty and hosts more than 600 students in its Juris Doctor program, while also offering the Master of Laws, Master of Studies in Law and Doctor of Juridical Science degrees in law.
Frank Hoover Easterbrook is an American lawyer and jurist who has served as a United States circuit judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit since 1985. He was the Seventh Circuit's chief judge from 2006 to 2013.
James Boyle is a Scottish intellectual property scholar. He is the William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law and co-founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University School of Law in Durham, North Carolina. He is most prominently known for advocating looser copyright policies in the United States and worldwide.
The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society is a research center at Harvard University that focuses on the study of cyberspace. Founded at Harvard Law School, the center traditionally focused on internet-related legal issues. On May 15, 2008, the center was elevated to an interfaculty initiative of Harvard University as a whole. It is named after the Berkman family. On July 5, 2016, the center added "Klein" to its name following a gift of $15 million from Michael R. Klein.
"A Rape in Cyberspace, or How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database into a Society" is an article written by freelance journalist Julian Dibbell and first published in The Village Voice in 1993. The article was later included in Dibbell's book My Tiny Life on his LambdaMOO experiences.
Diane Pamela Wood is an American attorney who serves as the director of the American Law Institute and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. She previously served as a circuit judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.
Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace is a 1999 book by Lawrence Lessig on the structure and nature of regulation of the Internet.
Information technology law, also known as information, communication and technology law or cyberlaw, concerns the juridical regulation of information technology, its possibilities and the consequences of its use, including computing, software coding, artificial intelligence, the internet and virtual worlds. The ICT field of law comprises elements of various branches of law, originating under various acts or statutes of parliaments, the common and continental law and international law. Some important areas it covers are information and data, communication, and information technology, both software and hardware and technical communications technology, including coding and protocols.
Richard Allen Posner is an American legal scholar and retired federal judge who served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit from 1981 to 2017. A senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, Posner was identified by The Journal of Legal Studies as the most-cited legal scholar of the 20th century. As of 2021, he is also the most-cited legal scholar of all time. He is widely considered to be one of the most influential legal scholars in the United States.
Internet and Technology Law Desk Reference is a non-fiction book about information technology law, written by Michael Dennis Scott. The book uses wording from legal cases to define information technology jargon, and gives citations to individual lawsuits. Scott received his B.S. degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and graduated with a J.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. He has taught as a law professor at Southwestern Law School. The book was published by Aspen Law and Business in 1999. Multiple subsequent editions were published under the imprint Aspen Publishers. Internet and Technology Law Desk Reference was recommended by the Cyberlaw Research Resources Guide at the James E. Rogers College of Law, and has been used as a reference in law journals including University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Economic Law, and Berkeley Technology Law Journal.
The pathetic dot theory or the New Chicago School theory was introduced by Lawrence Lessig in a 1998 article and popularized in his 1999 book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. It is a socioeconomic theory of regulation. It discusses how lives of individuals are regulated by four forces: the law, social norms, the market, and architecture.
The Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics is a research center at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The center's mission is to "advance teaching and research on ethical issues in public life." It is named for Edmond J. Safra and Lily Safra and is supported by the Edmond J. Safra Foundation. The Center for Ethics was the first interfaculty initiative at Harvard University.
David G. Post is an American legal scholar. Post is an expert in intellectual property law and cyberspace law. Until his retirement in 2014, Post served as Professor of Law at Beasley School of Law of Temple University in Philadelphia.
The 2016 presidential campaign of Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Harvard University and cofounder of Creative Commons, was formally announced on September 6, 2015, as Lessig confirmed his intentions to run for the Democratic Party's nomination for President of the United States in 2016. Lessig had promised to run if his exploratory committee raised $1 million by Labor Day, which it accomplished one day early. He described his candidacy as a referendum on campaign finance reform and electoral reform legislation.
Hiram Meléndez-Juarbe was a member of the Puerto Rico Commission on Civil Rights. He is a Professor and former Associate Dean at the University of Puerto Rico School of Law, where he teaches constitutional law, privacy and technology, copyright and intellectual property topics, cyberlaw, administrative law and seminars on constitutional law and cyberspace. He is founder of the UPR New Technologies, Intellectual Property and Society Clinic and co-legal lead of Creative Commons Puerto Rico. He graduated from the University of Puerto Rico, Harvard University and New York University. He is co-founder of the blawg derechoalderecho.
The University of Chicago Legal Forum is a student-edited journal published by the University of Chicago Law School. It focuses on a single, highly relevant, legal issue every year, presenting an authoritative and timely approach to a particular topic. To facilitate discussion, the Legal Forum hosts a symposium each fall and the participants contribute articles for the volume.
Distributed ledger technology law is not yet defined and recognized but an emerging field of law due to the recent dissemination of distributed ledger technology application in business and governance environment. Those smart contracts which were created through interaction of lawyers and developers and are intended to also be enforceable legal contracts are called smart legal contracts.