Musical Chairs: Larry Lessig to Harvard Law School

Dean Elena Kagan strikes again. From an HLS press release:

Renowned legal scholar Lawrence Lessig has been appointed to the faculty of Harvard Law School, and as the faculty director of Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics. The announcement was made jointly today (Dec. 12) by Harvard University Provost Steven E. Hyman and Harvard Law School Dean Elena Kagan.

Lessig — a widely acclaimed expert in constitutional law, cyberlaw, and intellectual property — comes to Harvard from the faculty of Stanford Law School. Prior to joining the Stanford faculty in 2000, he was on the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School and Harvard Law School.

Dean Kagan and HLS have been on a tremendous hiring spree. One source sums it up: “Can we get a list of who’s left — not counting federal judges like Posner, Easterbrook and Calabresi — that Kagan hasn’t scooped up in the last few years? Dworkin? Ackerman? Epstein?”

Says a second: “Dean Kagan is a juggernaut. In spite of losing about 25 percent of its endowment, Harvard is apparently not in a hiring freeze.”

More discussion, including words from Professor Lessig, after the jump.


A Stanford law student shrugs off the loss: “Students here have mixed feelings about the man. He is famous for his work on copyright and internet stuff, but his teaching isn’t focused on what people came here to learn from him. Also, he’s not very friendly.”

Not very friendly? That’s surprising, for a man who has almost 2200 friends on Facebook.

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Professor Lessig explains the reasons for his move over at Jonathan Zittrain’s blog (because, as Lessig explains on Twitter, his own blog was hacked). Lessig raves about his time at Stanford, but explains that given the shift in his scholarly focus, “from free culture related issues to (what I called) ‘corruption,'” he couldn’t pass up the extraordinary opportunity offered by HLS and the Safra Center.

Congratulations to Harvard on its hiring coup, and to Professor Lessig on his new gig!

Lawrence Lessig Named Professor of Law at HLS [Harvard Law School (press release)]

Required reading: big news [The Future of the Internet]

Larry Lessig: From Copyright to Politics, from Stanford (Back) to Harvard [WSJ Law Blog]

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