Yochai Benkler

Yochai Benkler
Yochai Benkler speaking at UC Berkeley School of Law in 2006
Born	1964 (age 52–53) Givatayim, Israel
Fields	Information technology law Industrial information economy
Institutions	Harvard Law School Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society
Alma mater	Tel-Aviv University Harvard Law School
Spouse	Deborah Schrag
Children	2
Website www.benkler.org

Yochai Benkler (born 1964) is an Israeli-American author and the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School. He is also a faculty co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

From 1984 to 1987, Benkler was a member and treasurer of the Kibbutz Shizafon. He received his LL.B. from Tel-Aviv University in 1991 and J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1994. He worked at the law firm Ropes & Gray from 1994–1995. He clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer from 1995 to 1996. Benkler is the last person to clerk for a U.S. Supreme Court justice without having prior judicial clerkship experience.

He was a professor at New York University School of Law from 1996 to 2003, and visited at Yale Law School and Harvard Law School (during 2002–2003), before joining the Yale Law School faculty in 2003. In 2007, Benkler joined Harvard Law School, where he teaches and is a faculty co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. Benkler is on the advisory board of the Sunlight Foundation. In 2011, his research led him to receive the $100,000 Ford Foundation Social Change Visionaries Award.

Benkler's research focuses on commons-based approaches to managing resources in networked environments. He coined the term 'commons-based peer production' to describe collaborative efforts based on sharing information, such as free and open source software and . He also uses the term 'networked information economy' to describe a "system of production, distribution, and consumption of information goods characterized by decentralized individual action carried out through widely distributed, nonmarket means that do not depend on market strategies."