Cyberlawyer 2.0

The Economist has a good profile of Larry Lessig…

WHEN working as a clerk in the early 1990s for Antonin Scalia, a Supreme Court Justice, a twenty-something law graduate became frustrated by the limitations of the creaking mainframe technology used by the court to publish its rulings—a system called Atex that is well known to veteran journalists. So he and another clerk made a presentation about the virtues of personal computers to the Supreme Court’s technology committee. The verdict from its chairman, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, was swift. “I want PCs on everyone’s desk on Monday,” she ruled. This was more than a one-time judicial victory. The incident also hinted at a legal career in which Lawrence Lessig—today one of America’s leading cyberlaw experts—would always argue on the side of technological progress…