Jonathan Zittrain is a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Previously, he was the Chair in Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford University and a principal of the Oxford Internet Institute.  He was also a visiting professor at the New York University School of Law and Stanford Law School.

Zittrain was a co-founder of the Berkman Center, where he served as its first executive director from 1997 to 2000. Before receiving his tenure this year, he was the Jack N. & Lillian R. Berkman Visiting Professor for Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School.

Zittrain’s research interests include battles for control of digital property and content, cryptography, electronic privacy, the roles of intermediaries within Internet architecture, and the useful and unobtrusive deployment of technology in education. He was co-counsel with Lawrence Lessig in Eldred v. Ashcroft, challenging the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998. The case lost 7-2 at the Supreme Court.

With students, he began Chilling Effects, a web site that tracks and archives legal threats made to Internet content producers. Google now sends its users to Chilling Effects when it has altered its search results at the behest of national governments.

He also performed the first large-scale tests of Internet filtering in China and Saudi Arabia in 2002, and as part of the OpenNet Initiative, he has co-edited a study of Internet filtering by national governments, “Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering.” His brainchild Herdict- a website that collects and tracks self-reported inaccessible sites from around the world- was launched in February, 2009.

His book about the future of the now-intertwined Internet and PC, “The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It,” came out in April 2008 from Yale University Press and Penguin UK — and under a Creative Commons license.

Zittrain holds a bachelor’s degree in cognitive science and artificial intelligence from Yale University, a J.D. from Harvard Law School, and a master’s in public administration from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.