Directory

James Boyle is William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law at Duke Law School and founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain. His newest book is The Line: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Personhood, MIT Press 2024, which is also available for free under a Creative Commons license. Professor Boyle joined the Duke faculty in July 2000. He has also taught at American University, Yale, Harvard, Boston University, and the University of Pennsylvania Law School.  He was one of the original Board Members, and eventually the Chairman of the Board, of Creative Commons, which works to facilitate the free availability of art, scholarship, and cultural materials by developing innovative, machine-readable licenses that individuals and institutions can attach to their work.  He was also a co-founder of Science Commons, which aimed to expand the Creative Commons mission into the realm of scientific and technical data, and has served as a member of the board of the Public Library of Science.  Professor Boyle was awarded the World Technology Network Award for Law for his work on the public domain and the “second enclosure movement” that threatens it.  The Electronic Frontier Foundation gave him their Pioneer Award for his work on digital civil liberties. Professor Boyle is also the author of Shamans, Software and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society,  The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind, and an open textbook, Intellectual Property: Law & the Information Society (6th ed. 2024) (with Jennifer Jenkins). He is the editor of Critical Legal Studies, Collected Papers on the Public Domain and Cultural Environmentalism @ 10 (with Larry Lessig.)  He has also written a distressing number of articles on intellectual property, internet regulation and legal theory both for scholarly journals and the popular press. His other books include two “scholarly comic books” co-written with Jennifer Jenkins — Bound By Law,  about fair use and Theft: A History of Music, a 2000 year story about music and musical borrowing, from Plato to rap.  His newspaper articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Washington Post, The Times Literary Supplement, Newsweek and the Economist.