Law of the Horse was a term used in the mid-1990s to define the state of

cyberlaw Information technology law (also called cyberlaw) concerns the law of information technology, including computing and the internet. It is related to legal informatics, and governs the digital dissemination of both (digitized) information and sof ...

during the nascent years of the Internet. The term first gained prominence in a 1996 cyberlaw conference presentation by Judge

Frank H. Easterbrook Frank Hoover Easterbrook (born September 3, 1948) is an American lawyer, jurist, and legal scholar who has served as a United States circuit judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit since 1985. He was the Seventh Circuit's chief ...

of the

United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit (in case citations, 7th Cir.) is the U.S. federal court with appellate jurisdiction over the courts in the following districts: * Central District of Illinois * Northern District of Il ...

. Easterbrook, who was also on the faculty of the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...

, later published his presentation in the University of Chicago Legal Forum as "Cyberspace and the Law of the Horse", in which he argued against the notion of defining cyberlaw as a unique section of legal studies and litigation. Easterbrook cited Gerhard Casper as coining the expression “law of the horse,” and stated that Casper's arguments against specialized or niche legal studies applied to cyberlaw: Easterbrook's theory was challenged by

Lawrence Lessig Lester Lawrence Lessig III (born June 3, 1961) is an American academic, attorney, and political activist. He is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the former director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard ...

, a professor at

Harvard Law School Harvard Law School (Harvard Law or HLS) is the law school of Harvard University, a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1817, it is the oldest continuously operating law school in the United States. Each class ...

, in a 1999 article "The Law of the Horse: What Cyberlaw Might Teach." Lessig's article, which was first presented at the

Boston University Law School Boston University School of Law (Boston Law or BU Law) is the law school of Boston University, a private research university in Boston, Massachusetts. It is consistently ranked among the top law schools in the United States and considered an e ...

Faculty Workshop, argued that legal perceptions and rules would need to evolve as the cyberspace environment developed and expanded.

References

Computer law Works about computer law Cyberspace Metaphors referring to horses {{law-term-stub

See also

References