Information Law Institute
The Information Law Institute at NYU School of Law provides an academic center for studying the effects of contemporary choices concerning the legal rules affecting the production, manipulation, storage, and dissemination of, and access to, information in the digitally networked society.
Purpose
Our purpose is to facilitate the analysis of a broad range of legal choices, commonly studied as dissociated technical areas of analysis, in terms of their role as the institutional parameters of the pattern of information flow in society. Our core mission is to illuminate the connections between these different areas of law, in terms of their real-world effects on information flow and the social and political implications of these effects in democratic societies.
Activities of the Institute
Founded in 2000 by Yochai Benkler, with seed funding from the Arthur S. and Marilyn Penn Foundation, the Institute endeavors to provide an organizational framework for the development of both theoretical and practical analyses of present institutional choices in line with its purposes. It sponsors an ongoing Colloquium on Information Technology and Society and has also organized conferences and workshops that bring together scholars from different fields to address problems of information law and policy. We aim to provide a hospitable framework to encourage and disseminate thoughtful research and commentary on information law and policy studies.