Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and The First AmendmentDirector, The Information Society Project, Yale Law School
Jack M. Balkin is Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School. He teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional law (with a special emphasis on the First Amendment), torts, jurisprudence, telecommunications and cyberspace law, multiculturalism, social theory, and the theory of ideology. His most recent book is “Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology (Yale University Press 1998). Professor Balkin has written dozens of articles on many different aspects of legal theory, ranging from legal philosophy and interpretive theory to telecommunications policy and antidiscrimination law. His interdisciplinary work ranges from law and economics and law and literature to law and music.
Professor Balkin received his A.B. and J.D. degrees from Harvard University and his Ph.D in philosophy from Cambridge University. He served as a clerk for Judge Carolyn D. King of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and practiced as an attorney at Cravath, Swaine, and Moore in New York City before entering the legal academy. He has taught at several law schools in the United States and has been a visiting professor at the Buchman Faculty of Law at Tel Aviv University and Queen Mary and Westfield College at the University of London. He is the founder and director of Yale’s Information Society Project, a center devoted to the study of law and the new information technologies.