EDUCAUSE Live! September 15, 2005 1:00 p.m. EDT (12:00 p.m. CDT, 11:00 a.m. MDT, 10:00 a.m. PDT); runs one hour

Whose Law? The Problem of Jurisdiction on the Internet

Special Guest

David G. Post
Professor of Law
Temple University Law School

David G. Post is the I. Herman Stern Professor of Law at Temple University Law School, where he teaches intellectual property law and the law of cyberspace. Post is also an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and co-founder and co-director of the Cyberspace Law Institute and of ICANN Watch.

Trained originally as a physical anthropologist, Post spent two years studying the feeding ecology of yellow baboons in Kenya's Amboseli National Park, and he taught at the Columbia University Department of Anthropology from 1976 through 1981. He then attended Georgetown Law Center, from which he graduated summa cum laude in 1986. After clerking with then-Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, he spent six years at the Washington, D.C., law firm of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering, practicing in the areas of intellectual property law and high technology commercial transactions. He clerked again for Justice Ginsburg, at the Supreme Court of the United States, before joining the faculty of the Georgetown University Law Center (1994–1997) and then the Temple University Law School (1997–present).

Post is the co-author (with Paul Schiff Berman and Patricia Bellia) of Cyberlaw: Problems of Policy and Jurisprudence in the Information Age, as well as numerous articles on intellectual property, the law of cyberspace, and the application of complexity theory to Internet legal questions. He has appeared as a commentator on numerous radio and television programs, and in 1996–1997 he conducted, along with Larry Lessig and Eugene Volokh, the first Internet-wide e-mail course on "Cyberspace Law for Non-Lawyers," which attracted more than 20,000 subscribers. He also plays guitar, piano, banjo, and harmonica in the band "Bad Dog."

Summary

Your host, Steve Worona, will be joined by David G. Post and the topic will be "Whose Law? The Problem of Jurisdiction on the Internet."

The question "What law am I obligated to obey?" is a fundamental one in any legal system and one that every lawyer should be able to answer for his or her client. It is, though, deceptively complex—even in the non-Internet context. David Post will try to make some sense of this question as applied to activity on the Internet, both by presenting a very general framework for thinking about "jurisdictional" questions and by analyzing a number of recent cases raising specific jurisdictional issues.

Related EDUCAUSE Resources

• Federal Policy Program
• Archives of past EDUCAUSE Live! seminars

Additional Resources

• David Post's writings