Urs Gasser is the Executive Director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, a faculty member at Harvard Law School, Guest Professor at Keio University’s Environment and Information Studies, visiting professor at the University of St. Gallen, and a fellow at the Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioral Research.
He serves on a number of boards of Internet & Society Centers in Italy, Germany, and Switzerland. Before joining the Berkman Center as Executive Director in 2009, Gasser was the first National Science Foundation Professor on the Faculty of Law at the University of St. Gallen, where he led the Research Center for Information Law as Faculty Director. Prior to his St. Gallen appointment, Gasser spent three years as a resident fellow at the Berkman Center, where he got involved as an LL.M. student at Harvard in 2002, and served subsequently as the lead fellow on the Digital Media Project, a multi-disciplinary research project aimed at exploring the transition from offline/analog to online/digital media. During this time, he also initiated and chaired the Harvard-Yale-Cyberscholar Working Group, and was a visiting researcher at Harvard Law School in the 2003/04 academic year.
Gasser has written and edited several books, and published over 100 articles in professional journals. He is the co-author of Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives (Basic Books, 2008, with John Palfrey) that has been translated into ten languages (including Chinese), reviewed in science, and named as a top science and technology book for 2008 by Library Journal; and co-author of Interop: The Promise and Perils of Highly Interconnected Systems (Basic Books, 2012, with John Palfrey), reviewed favourably both in Science and Nature. As a student of Jean Nicolas Druey and Herbert Burkert, Gasser’s research and teaching activities focus on information law, policy and society issues. He has contributed to the information law approach, starting with his dissertation on the causality and responsibility for information as a legal problem, for which he received three awards, including the Walther Hug Prize for one of the best doctoral theses in law nationwide. Heavily influenced and inspired by Druey’s work, Gasser’s initial work focused on core issues of information law, including the question of information overload and information quality, mostly from a private law perspective. He also wrote a series of articles framing the St. Gallen approach to information law, several of them in collaboration with Herbert Burkert. Beginning with his exposure to the Berkman Center during his LL.M. at Harvard Law School in 2002, his focus shifted on exploring the impact of digital technologies from an information law perspective. In parallel and influenced by American legal thought, Gasser collaborated with Burkert to further develop the information law approach (see description in Burkert’s chapter) and internationalize it.
References:
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/ugasser;
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urs_Gasser
List of publications: