I regret to inform you that there is even more to the story of how Cornell President Michael Kotlikoff backed his car into a student. I also regret to inform you that Cornell’s Board of Trustees has made things worse.
For ease of reading, I’ve put a timeline at the end of this post with all of the primary documents: videos, statements, op-eds, etc. The first section is background; feel free to skip it if you’re familiar with the story and my own op-ed about the incident.
On April 30, a group of people followed President Kotlikoff after an on-campus event, repeatedly asking him questions about Cornell’s speech and discipline policies. He eventually declined to engage further, walked to his car, turned it on, and then backed it into a student. The next day (May 1), Kotlikoff issued a statement describing the incident, the key paragraph of which was demonstrably false:
They continued to follow me to my car and then surrounded the car, banging on the windows, blocking the car, and shouting. I waited until I saw space behind the car and then, using my car’s rear pedestrian alert and automatic braking system, was able to slowly maneuver my car from the parking space and exit the parking lot.
We know it is false becase one member of the group took a video of the collision, which the Cornell Daily Sun published that same day. The video unambiguously shows Kotlikoff’s car making contact with the student, who backs away as the car continues to reverse into him. The university then released security-camera footage of the interaction in the parking lot, which also showed the contact. The university’s statement, attributed to Vice President for University Relations Kyle Kimball, said, “This is complete footage of the parking lot interactions, instead of clips to support a narrative” (confirming that Cornell considers what the video authentic and authoritative).
Over the next week, several organizations—including Cornell’s AAUP chapter and the Sun editorial board—criticized Kotlikoff’s actions and his statement. The Sun’s editorial described the statement, accurately and presciently, as as emblematic of “an administration that protects itself, not its students.”
On May 7, I joined them with an op-ed in the Sun. I argued that his statement was false or misleading in three ways that were disproven by the video evidence. I wrote:
- The videos do not show anyone “banging on the windows” and the audio does not contain the sounds of banging or “shouting.” The car was not “surrounded” until after he began driving. Taking the University at its word that the security video is “complete footage of the parking lot interactions,” Kotlikoff’s claims are false.
- The videos show that a person (identified by The Sun as a Cornell student) was stationary behind the car in its path of travel when Kotlikoff backed up, and that he backed the car up into them several times. His claim that “I waited until I saw space behind the car” is explicitly false.
- His claim that “using my car’s rear pedestrian alert and automatic braking system, [I] was able to slowly maneuver my car from the parking space and exit the parking lot” is materially misleading. A reasonable reader of this passage would be under the false impression that Kotlikoff used his car’s safety features to avoid striking anyone.
I added that a student who engaged in similar conduct would be subject to disciplinary action, and that intentionally driving a car into someone and giving false statements about it could have serious legal consequences. I listed the tort of assault, the tort of battery, the crime of reckless endangerment, and the crime of making false statements in an investigation.
That same day, an Ad Hoc Special Committee of the Board of Trustees announced that it had been established “to oversee an investigation into the events of April 30, 2026, involving Cornell President Michael I. Kotlikoff and a group of individuals.” The committee consisted of the Board’s chair (Anne Meinig Smalling) and its three vice chairs (Howard L. Morgan, Beckie Robertson, and Stephen C. Robinson). The actual investigation was to be conducted by the Cornell University Police Department (CUPD), and Kotlikoff would be recused from any involvement in it.
A correction: I said on Bluesky that the Board’s announcement was “two hours later” than my post. That was wrong; in fact it was almost exactly two hours earlier. I did not see the announcement until after my op-ed was live, and I failed to notice that it had been sent out well before then.
On May 15, the committee released another statement describing the results of the review, and later that day, Kotlikoff released his own statement looking back on the incident and review. I want to start with Kotlikoff’s statement, because he has substantially changed his story about what happened in the parking lot:
When I shared my experience with the community on May 1st, I did not believe, based on the information I had at the time, that my car had made any contact with anyone. Only when I saw the videos circulating later did I realize that a student had placed himself directly behind the car without my being aware of it as I backed up. Only the following afternoon did I understand that my experience would look very different in the selected video clips posted on social media and be framed in ways that I found genuinely shocking. In the moment, my goal was extricating myself from the situation safely without escalating it. In retrospect, I certainly should have remained in my car, locked it, and called the police. (emphasis added)
I find this explanation credible. It is consistent with what is visible in the videos, and it parsimoniously explains why his May 1 statement said what it did. Taking what he now says at face value, I belive that his May 1 statement was false but not intentionally so. In particular:
- The “banging on the windows,” “shouting,” and “surround[ing]” the car take place after he backed into the student (and in substantial part because of it). These claims no longer read as excuses by someone who knows he drove his car into someone; they read as context provided by someone who didn’t think he had.
- “I waited until I saw space behind the car” is a mistake of fact. There was not space, but he thought that there was.
- The implied claim that he used his car’s safety features to avoid striking anyone is also a mistake of fact. He was under the same incorrect impression that a reader of this passage would take away from it.
You don’t need to agree with me. Indeed, part of the point of having a neutral and thorough adjudication process is so that a well-informed fact-finder can decide whether testimony is credible. All I am saying is that I personally believe Kotlikoff when he now says that he didn’t know at the time there was someone behind his car.
If all of this is correct, then many of the other legal consequences I discussed in my op-ed drop away. Battery and assault are intentional torts; without an intent to make contact or create a fear of contact, there is no wrongful act. Reckless endangerment requires recklessness—the “conscious[] disregard[] [of] a substantial and unjustifiable risk “ with a “gross deviation” from a reasonable person’s standard of care. At low speeds the belief that no one is in the car’s path of travel strikes me as a deviation but not necessarily a gross deviation from reasonably careful driving. And if one believes in the truth of what one is saying, there is no wilfully false statement.
On the other hand, this is hardly to say that Kotlikoff comes across well. The assault and endangerment sections of the Student Code of Conduct do not have comparable mental-state elements. A student who engaged in similar conduct and gave a similar statement would still be subject to Cornell discipline. A university president should know better, and should be held at least to the same standards as any other community member.
Even worse is that from at least May 1 onwards—when the Sun first published its story with the student video—Kotlikoff should have known beyond any doubt that he had driven into a student. He should have known beyond any doubt that his statement to the Cornell community was at best deeply misleading. It reflects a serious failure of judgment that he did not correct the record until May 15, a full two weeks later.
I respect that he refained from comment while the Special Committee’s review was pending (i.e. between May 7 and May 15), but that still leaves six days (i.e. from May 1 to May 7) during which he did nothing to set the record straight. Indeed, a vice president who reports directly to him put out a statement (on May 3) purporting to exonerate him but which actually did the opposite.
It is also striking that Kotlikoff’s May 15 statement does not contain any apologies. He does not express any contrition that he drove his car into a student. He does not express regret about misleading the Cornell community. I, for one, think that we are entitled to expect more from our leaders.
Now for the Ad Hoc Special Committee. To summarize its findings:
You will have noticed, I hope, what is missing from this list. The Special Committe’s statement doesn’t say anything about whether President Kotlikoff acted appropriately on April 30, when he drove his car into a student. It doesn’t say anything about his false statement of May 1, or about his failure to correct that statement once its falsity was apparent. It doesn’t say anything about whether CUPD’s investigation included Kotlikoff’s conduct on April 30, or whether the commitee itself considered his conduct. And when it discusses Kotlikoff’s behavior (as opposed to the other individuals’), it’s about his commitment to freedom of speech, not about driving his car into people.
This isn’t even a whitewash. It’s a brush-off. The reason that the Board of Trustees needed to get involved was that a university’s president cannot in good faith investigate himself. The entire point of appointing a special committee and walling Kotlikoff off from the CUPD investigation was to ensure that someone neutral and detatched, someone with only Cornell’s interests in mind, would take seriously the question of whether he violated Cornell’s standards of conduct and the trust that the university community has placed in him. Everything else is a sideshow.
Instead, the Special Committee seems to have believed that there were two reasons for their involvement: (1) to ensure that any disciplinary action taken against the other individuals would be untainted by Kotlikoff’s influence, and (2) to show that the Board still has confidence in his leadership. Neither of these reasons stands up to serious scrutiny. The issue of disciplinary action is moot, because Kotlikoff chose not to initiate a complaint. And the Board’s confidence is misconceived, because there is no legitimate basis for them to have that confidence unless they have actually seriously considered the reasons other people might question his fitness. If the committee did any of this work, they have not said so.
The Special Committee’s report did Kotlikoff and Cornell no favors. What he needed—what we needed—was a thoughtful discussion of his conduct on April 30 and May 1. The Trustees needed to ask whether it is a problem that the President did not check his rear-view mirrors properly, whether it is a problem that he did not stop after someone shouted that he’d run over their foot, whether it is a problem that he issued a statement without investigating facts within his ability to find out, and whether it is a problem that he failed to correct that statement promptly once he knew it was false. I am willing to accept answers to those questions that differ from my own. I am not willing to accept the implicit assertion that these aren’t even questions worth asking.
There is a running theme in much of the commentary on this incident: to make it about the people who followed Kotlikoff to his car. That was the emphasis of his initial May 1 statement, and it is a major theme in his later May 15 statement and the Special Committee’s statement. Simiarly, in letters to the Sun, Paul Muller ‘91 criticized the students involved as “utterly, stupidly pretentious,” and more recently a group of over 500 community members expressed support for Kotlikoff, describing the individuals’ actions as “a breakdown of the rules that protect us all.”
I want to be extremely clear about this. I take no position on their conduct. I have my own thoughts on the matter, and I intend to keep those thoughts to myself. For a detailed discussion of demonstrative protest and the relationship between speech and safety on Cornell campuses, I recommend the report of the Committee on Expressive Activity that I served on. Many other people have weighed in in on the individuals’ actions, and I have linked to their commentaries in the timeline below. I invite you to consider their views and make up your own mind about the appropriateness of disciplinary action, criminal charges, and persona non grata orders.
I say this because it’s dangerously easy to fall into the trap of thinking that exactly one side must be right. If the individuals were behaving threateningly, then Kotlikoff was justified in driving into them—or, if they were acting innocently, then what he did must be grievously wrong. But that’s not how it works. Both sides in a dispute can be behaving well (an impassioned but respectful conversation), or both sides can be behaving badly (a duel with pistols at twenty paces).
Whether these other people crossed a morally or legally significant line is mostly irrelevant to whether President Kotlikoff did. It matters only insofar as they did or did not put him in a state of reasonable fear or confusion that could justify or excuse his actions. By his own later admissions, I think it is fair to say that they did not.
I care about this case because I care deeply about the university that Michael Kotlikoff and the Board of Trustees lead. I care enough to want Cornell to do the right thing, both when other people are behaving well and when they aren’t.
I no longer have confidence in the Special Committee’s members, which means I no longer have confidence in the Chair and the three Vice-Chairs of Cornell’s Board of Trustees. They took on a discrete task of great importance to the university, but they utterly failed to understand the assignment. These are not people who have demonstrated the judgment we require from our leaders. The Board of Trustees should dismiss them and replace them with officers who can actually do their jobs.
May 1: Kotlikoff statement: “Harassment and intimidation incident at Day Hall”
May 1, 11:06 PM: Cornell Daily Sun article (including handheld video)
May 1: Kyle Kimball statement: “Video of harassment and intimidation incident at Day Hall” (including security-camera footage) (updated May 3 with “enhanced (zoomed-in and brightened) version”)
May 4: Students for a Democratic Cornell statement: “Statement to the Community Regarding Recent Events”
May 4: Persona non grata order issued to Milton Taam ‘73, per the May 15 Sun article “Alumnus Present at Kotlikoff Car Incident Issued Persona Non Grata, 3-Year Ban From Campus”
May 5, 1:14 PM: Paul Muller ‘91 letter: “Students, Get Over Yourselves”
May 5, 6:18 PM: Cornell Daily Sun editorial: “President Kotlikoff, It’s Time To Hit the Brakes”
May 6, 12:00 PM: Graduate student op-ed: “Kotlikoff Must Resign”
May 7, 5:00 PM: Cornell AAUP op-ed: “President Kotlikoff’s Actions Demand an Independent Investigation”
May 7, 5:28 PM, “Statement from Ad Hoc Special Committee of the Board of Trustees on Investigation”
May 7, 7:30 PM: James Grimmelmann op-ed: “Kotlikoff Makes the Rules; He Needs to Follow Them Too”
May 15, 10:03 AM: “Statement from Ad Hoc Special Committee of the Board of Trustees”
May 15, 3:40 PM: Kotlikoff statement: “Observations on April 30 incident”
May 18, 4:00 PM: Letter from 500 community members, “In Support of Peaceful Protest”
May 20, 12:00 PM: Paul Sawyer op-ed: “Kotlikoff’s Record on Dissent Raises Concerns About His Fitness to Lead Cornell”
May 20, 5:30 PM: Milton Taam op-ed: “Kotlikoff Weaponizes Dialogue”
May 20: “Inter-organization statement on April 30/May 1 incident””
May 21, 4:22 PM: Joseph Margulies ‘82 op-ed: “The Potemkin Process”
I’ve changed my mission statement. The old one read:
I study how laws regulating software affect freedom, wealth, and power. I try to help lawyers and technologists understand each other. My research interests include content moderation, digital copyright, generative AI, digital property, and other topics in computer and Internet law.
The new one reads:
I try to bring technical, legal, and conceptual clarity to the foundations of information and Internet law. I want to help lawyers and technologists understand each other. My research areas include generative AI, content moderation, platform regulation, online copyright, and digital property.
My old statement focused on the policy consequences of legal rules; my new one focuses on the legal rules themselves. To be clear, this is a change in emphasis. I’ve always cared about both policy and law and I expect that I always will. Nor is this a sudden shift in what I’m doing. Instead, I’ve updated the description to catch up with a gradual evolution in how I understand my scholarly contributions.
Still, the difference is real. I care most about getting the analytical parts of technology law right, I enjoy working on it, and I’m good (enough) at it. Anything I might write about technology policy, many other people can do better—but my ideas about technology law itself are weird enough that they simply will not get written unless I do it myself.
To give more of a sense of what my new statement means, let me unpack the invidual phrases, in a kind of Reporter’s Note:
One reason that I revised my statement is that I realized people were picking up on the wrong words in it. They’d ask me to write or speak about big, sweeping policy issues when there are other scholars who would be better fits. Freedom, wealth, and power matter enormously and are all important to my work, but I’m not an expert on any of them as such, and I’m afraid the old statement gave the misleading impression that I am. I hope the new version gives a better sense of what it is I do, and why.
What is knowledge? To know something is to correctly understand the world, so knowledge must involve the coming together of truth and belief.
Unfortunately, a definition of knowledge as “true belief” doesn’t work, because truth and belief can coincide by coincidence. For example, suppose that I have a high fever and hallucinate that my sister is in front of me talking to me, but in reality she is sitting quietly in a chair behind. I believe that she’s in the room with me, and it’s true that she’s in the room with me, but I don’t know that she’s in the room with me, because my belief that she’s in the room is based on bad reasons, reasons that are completely disconnected from the fact that she actually is in the room.
Thus, in epistemology, the traditional definition of knowledge was as “justified true belief.” The point of adding justification is to deal with cases in which I believe something for bad reasons but it coincidentally happen to be true.
Unfortunately, philosophers have recognized that this definition fails, by giving examples in which justification doesn’t do the work it’s supposed to. These examples are most often called “Gettier cases” or “Gettier problems,” after Edmund Gettier, who wrote a famously concise and highly influential article on the issue in 1963. Consider the following scenario (my paraphrase of an example posed by Roderick Chisholm):
I am standing in a field and I believe there is a sheep in the field with me because I can see what looks like a sheep. It turns out, however, (a) that I am looking at a dog disguised as a sheep, and (b) there is a real sheep behind the hill in the middle of the field. Thus:
- I belive that there is a sheep in the field. (I really do believe it.)
- My belief is justified. (Seeing what looks like a sheep is a good reason to believe that it is one.)
- My belief is true. (There is a sheep in the field, behind the hill.)
The problem here is that once again, my belief is true for the wrong reasons. Seeing what looks like a sheep is sufficient to justify my belief, but not sufficient to actually make it true. This failure, however, is perfectly offset by the coincidence that there is a sheep behind the hill. What makes the belief true is not the same as what justifies it.
The range of scholarly responses to Gettier cases is immense. Some philosophers use them to argue that the problem goes away on a fallibilist theory of knowledge, one on which one’s knowledge is always subject to refutation or revision. These approaches attack the truth element of knowledge, because they are open to the possibility that one can “know” false things. Other philosophers have tried to formulate a more rigorous justification element, one that rules out Gettier-style coincidences. (These efforts often seem to run afoul of Gödelian incompleteness; any definition of justification provides a roadmap for evading it.)
But the present author is by no means a philosopher, and it seems to me that that there is a much simpler response. If knowledge hinges on the nexus between what is actually true in the world and what justification we have for our beliefs, and the two can coincide or come apart by happenstance, then perhaps knowledge is not a philosophically important concept. Truth matters, and we can reason about what is actually true in the world. Belief matters, and we can assign moral weight to what a person does and doesn’t believe. Justification matters, and we can debate what evidence is sufficient to justify a belief. But knowledge, by itself, is too contingent to matter.
To me, then, the real lesson of Gettier cases is that the entire attempt to define knowledge in terms of true belief is a dead end. Introducing justification was important not because it patched up the definition—or could be made to patch it up with suitable revisions—but because it introduced the thing we actually ought to care about when we ask what people know. What are we justified in believing? is a great question, and one that is far more useful to ask than What do we know?
Here in higher education, the capitulations will continue until morale improves. After Columbia’s shameful deal with the Trump administration last summer, I pledged not to donate to the university or to perform any service for it unless and until it repents and atones. Since then, several other universities have followed suit. I want to focus on two—Northwestern and Cornell—that raise similar enough issues to require a response on my part.
Start with Northwestern. Although its agreement includes a disclaimer that it does not give the “United States authority to dictate faculty hiring, University hiring, admission decisions, Northwestern’s curriculum, or the content of academic speech and research,” several provisions do in fact trade away core university principles of institutional autonomy, academic freedom, and openness to all. Among other things, the agreement requires Northwestern to disband one committee (§ 10) and create another (§ 15), prohibit nondisruptive acts of protest (§ 13), change its admissions (§ 21) and hiring (§ 25) in ways that make it harder to prevent invidious discrimination, prohibit diversity statements in hiring (§ 26), exclude trans women from female-designated athletic facilities (§ 28), and cease providing gender-affirming care to minors (§ 29). The university is also paying $75 million in what can only be described as protection money. I regret to say that Northwestern has compromised its fundamental values in the name of expedience, just as Columbia did.
As a result, I’m adding Northwestern to my pledge. I will not speak at conferences held at or organized by Northwestern. I will not publish with Northwestern publications or provide peer reviews for them. I will not provide outside tenure evaluations for Northwestern departments. I will not contribute in any way to the institution until everyone who is responsible for its shameful decision has resigned, retired, or been fired, and until Northwestern repudiates their catastrophic choice. If any other universities strike similarly repugnant deals, I will add them as well.
Now for Cornell. Things here are different in two ways. First, while its agreement is not good, it is nowhere near as bad as Columbia’s or Northwestern’s. Unlike their deals, there are no terms in Cornell’s that significantly compromise the academic freedom of the university’s affiliates or the university’s own institutional autonomy. My colleague Nate Foster and our local AAUP chapter have published thoughtful critiques of the Cornell agreement. I agree with their criticisms of the provisions on admissions data, campus climate surveys, and providing tendentious training materials to faculty and staff. But I think that while these terms are harmful and ill-advised, none of them cut to the heart of what it means to be a university.
The worst terms in the Cornell agreement are the financial ones. Cornell will pay $30 million to the federal government over three years. This is straight-up protection money, and paying it is shameful. Cornell has also pledged to spend $30 million on programs that combine agriculture with AI and robotics. Although the money will be spent on potentially worthwhile research, this particular cause is serving as such an obvious fig leaf that in a way it is even more embarassing. This said, I have seen universities lose far larger sums in even more pathetic ways. I don’t feel that mishandling money like this requires me or others to avoid performing academic service for Cornell. (Donors, however, might rightly question whether they should be supporting a university that squanders its money on bribes to a bullying government.)
The other relevant difference for Cornell is that I work here. My labor is not a gift that I gave freely and can freely suspend. I negotiated the terms under which I provide my labor to the university. Among those terms is that they pay me. The roof over my head and the food on my table are not trifles. For my part, I’ve promised to teach my courses, advise my students, perform my research, serve on commitees, and do the million other things that make up the job of a professor.
There’s something else to this, too. I’m a member of a community here, one with tighter bonds and greater commitments than the general worldwide community of scholars. I have obligations. My students are counting on me. My advisees are counting on me. My colleagues are counting on me. I know the names of the people who’ll be left in the lurch if I don’t show up to class. They signed up to take my course, with me. My first responsibility is to them, because, again, this is what it means to work at a university.
This is not to say that I feel obliged to support Cornell no matter what. There is no institution in the world that you should support no matter what. Rather, as I said last time, universities exist to promote the discovery, preservation, and transmission of knowledge, and upholding that value means different things depending on one’s relationship to the university in question. I can certainly imagine that Cornell could do things so repugnant that I would feel obliged to resign—but the bar is much higher when it comes to one’s own university.
This is the story that I tell when people ask me how I got into Internet law. Like all of its kind, it’s a polished and refracted version of what actually happened. Still, for all the misremembered details and conscious omissions, it bears a resemblance to the truth.
Late in the summer of 1999, armed with a bachelors degree in computer science, a working knowledge of some programming languages, and an exceptional degree of self-confidence, I set out to conquer the world. I took a job as a software engineer at Microsoft Research in Seattle for a compiler-tools group I had interned for during college. My plan was to work there for a few years, identify some problems I wanted to solve, and then either stay in the software industry or go back to get a PhD in computer science.
To quote Colson Whitehead:
I could do it. It was going to be a great year. I was sure of it. Isn’t it funny? The way the mind works?
The group I joined was reorganized out of existence that fall; my new manager was a literal and metaphorical pointy-haired boss. I spent the winter discovering what being miserable at work felt like, and I spent the spring fighting corporate bureaucracy to be allowed to transfer. I had to go up three levels and tell the vice president of Microsoft Research that I’d quit if they tried to make me stay in a group I hadn’t signed up for.
I wound up moving in mid-2000 to a product group, doing XML internals for a new web-based office suite called NetDocs. The working conditions were much better: I had an exemplary manager and some wonderful colleagues. But again, entropy won. In late spring of 2001, NetDocs became the most expensive cancelled project in Microsoft history. (If you know much about the history of the web stack, you’ll understand why it was an idea fatally ahead of its time.)
At any other time in the last few decades, I might have stayed in the tech industry. But this was the low following the dot-com crash, and things seemed equally bleak everywhere else. It wasn’t just that there weren’t many jobs; it was that no one seemed to be doing anything interesting, anything worthwhile. (If you know some Internet history, you’ll understand how hilariously wrong I was.)
With no obvious lifeboat to jump ship for, I was thrown back on myself, and I came to realize that software development wasn’t for me. Programming had been a stimulating part-time vocation in college, but it was a tedious slog as a full-time job. I liked everyone on my team, but I hated working as part of one. One of my good friends has described her ideal job as sitting in a room by herself, being passed puzzles through a slot in the door, solving them, and passing them back out through the slot. I had thought that was what programming was—and for me, it wasn’t.
I resigned in the summer of 2001. I wasn’t pushed; I jumped. I knew that I could stay employed as long as I wanted to. I could write code that worked well enough, get good-enough performance reviews, and feel happy enough about coming in to work. The problem was that I could see how my motivation was already draining away. I didn’t hate my job now, but I knew that I’d hate it in ten years, and it was better to get out now rather than wait.
Now we need to rewind a few years, because even as my career as a technologist was undergoing an uncontrolled descent, something else was rising to take its place. My grandmother died in December of 1999, and thus, very close to the darkest day of the year, I took a red-eye to be home for the funeral. If it was not quite the lowest point of my life, it was a local minimum. But when we hit our lowest point, we are open to the greatest change.
On the flight home, I read Lawrence Lessig’s Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace. It was, and remains, the most revelatory book I have ever read, and my entire academic career consists of a series of footnotes to Lessig. But even putting aside how it changed my life by teaching me about Internet policy, it changed my life by showing me that a law professor understood computers better than anyone I knew did. Even from his outsider’s perspective, Lessig cut to the heart of how the Internet worked, and how it could change under legal pressure. Lawyers had access to an entirely different source of knowledge about the technologies I’d devoted myself to studying.
In fact, I soon discovered, the lawyerly way of seeing the world was congenial to the way my brain worked. I had thought that law and legalese were brain-numbingly boring, equal parts superficial rhetoric and bad theatrics. But every time I read an actual legal text (and there were plenty in those heady days of U.S. v. Microsoft, Napster, and DeCSS), I found it logical and persuasive. There was something surprisingly familiar to me about how judges approached a problem. As I read more, I started to wonder whether “law professor” was shorthand for a job where you got paid to write about interesting things.
I also did my due diligence about the road to get there. I asked my friends in law school about the experience, and I snuck peeks at their books when they weren’t looking. Then I found a cheap copy of the Dukeminier property casebook at a used bookstore, and I was hooked: here was an intricate and sometimes elegant system of rules that structured the entire world around me. (It stuck: Property is my core first-year subject, and I’ve written extensively in the field.) By the time I took the LSAT and applied to law school, I had a pretty good sense of what to expect.
I also started blogging in May 2000, and I found that writing for the blog—even just for the small group of friends and random Internet acquaintances who read it—filled a part of me I hadn’t realized was hollow. On evenings and weekends, and even some days in hours stolen at work, I wrote and wrote and wrote. Publishing a post gave me a sense of satisfaction that checking in code notably didn’t. My early law blogging was terrible (I keep those posts online out of honesty, not out of pride), but it felt meaningful.
I didn’t go immediately to law school after quitting Microsoft. I spent a year back in Boston, working part-time at Harvard (I wrote reports on why study abroad was broken and why moving the sciences to Allston would be a logistical disaster) and trying my hand at being a freelance writer (I failed miserably). But even if I was supposedly keeping my options open, I had a strong sense that law was where I was meant to be. When I was accepted to Yale—infamous for training future law professors—it was an easy decision to enroll.
When I arrived in law school, I told myself that if I didn’t become a legal academic, I’d go back to programming rather than practice law. Fortunately, that was a choice I didn’t have to make. This is my nineteenth year as a law professor studying and teaching Internet law. My job as a Cornell Law School faculty member working at Cornell Tech is exactly halfway in between technology and law. It’s a kind of position that didn’t exist when I started teaching law, and it feels as though it was created specifically for me. I cannot imagine anything better.
I’ve been extraordinarily fortunate in my career. But it started with a terrible mistake. I’m able to do what I do today only because I was able to accept that I wasn’t who I thought I was twenty-five years ago.