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Faculty Lives in Public Service features Professor James Boyle

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James BoyleUsing examples from his own work in the early debates over the regulation of the Internet, James Boyle, William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law, stressed to students that they have both the tools and the responsibility to bring about wider public debate on matters of social importance. “What often gets ignored is that this kind of work, apart of being part of a lawyer's public service responsibilities, is also exhilarating, fascinating, and downright fun,” he said.

Boyle is a world-renowned scholar with wide ranging interests in intellectual property and cyberlaw and related issues, including critical legal theory, post-modernism and political economy. In 2002, he co-founded, with Duke Law Professors David Lange and Jerome Reichman, the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke.

Also in his speech, Boyle fielded questions from students about various current aspects of the Internet, discussed his career as an academic, and spoke about his work with non-profit organizations dedicated to the protection of the public domain.