Lawיוחאי בנקלר

Yochai Benkler

Yochai Benkler is an Israeli-American legal scholar at Harvard Law School, known for coining the term commons-based peer production and for his 2006 book The Wealth of Networks.

born 1964Coining commons-based peer productionThe book The Wealth of NetworksResearch on the networked information economy

Occupation: economist, university teacher, lawyer, legal scholar
Education: Harvard Law School, Tel Aviv University

Yochai Benkler was born in 1964 in Givatayim

Benkler was born in 1964 in Givatayim, where he grew up and went to school. From 1984 to 1987 he was a member and treasurer of Kibbutz Shizafon.

He earned a law degree from Tel Aviv University in 1991 and a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1994. He then worked at the law firm Ropes & Gray and clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer from 1995 to 1996.

He taught at New York University School of Law from 1996 to 2003 and joined the Yale Law School faculty in 2003. In 2007 he moved to Harvard Law School, where he is a faculty co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. In 2011 he received a $100,000 Ford Foundation award for social change visionaries.

His research looks at shared, network-based ways of producing and managing information, such as open source software and online encyclopedias. His 2006 book The Wealth of Networks argues that social production is changing markets and freedom. He later published The Penguin and the Leviathan in 2011 and Network Propaganda in 2018, a book on American media around the 2016 election.