John Palfrey

John Gorham Palfrey VII (born 1972) is an American educator, scholar, and law professor.

He is an authority on the legal aspects of emerging media and an advocate for Internet freedom, including increased online transparency and accountability as well as child safety.

He studied Internet usage and attitudes; according to his assessment, an important aspect of the digital revolution was the "massive generation gap" between those who were "born digital"—i.e., after 1980—and those who were not.

According to Palfrey, digital natives (those born after 1980 and who grew up with the Internet) are more likely to "see relationships differently" as well as access information in new ways from previous generations.

He is a supporter of information sharing while maintaining copyrights:

"We should figure out how to offer legitimate services that enable people to be accountable to one another online, using innovations like Creative Commons licenses, which make sharing legitimately much easier."

Palfrey graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1990.

He attended Harvard College and graduated in 1994, magna cum laude.

Palfrey was co-captain of Harvard's 1994 undefeated national championship squash team, winning the team's fourth straight national title.

He graduated in 1997 from Pembroke College, Cambridge, with an M.Phil. in history.

While there, he was distinguished as a Rotary Scholar.

Palfrey returned to Boston and graduated from Harvard Law School in 2001.

Palfrey served as finance director in Boston for the campaign of Lois Pines for the position of Massachusetts Attorney General.

Palfrey served as executive director of Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

He has been an important figure at Harvard Law School and served as executive director of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society from 2002 to 2008.

In 2003, Palfrey was appointed to the faculty of Harvard Law School, partly hired by Elena Kagan, and his research interests included intellectual property issues such as copyright law, Internet law, and international law.

He served as a visiting professor of Law and Information at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, from 2007 to 2008.

He was appointed to the vice-dean post in 2008.

He was also awarded tenure at the Harvard Law School in 2008.

In 2008, Palfrey served as the chair of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, a year-long national effort to explore how children could "avoid unwanted contact and content" online.

He believes digital literacy should be an important public issue in schools so that kids can "sort credible from non-credible information".

Palfrey testified before Congress on child safety issues in the digital age.

He advocated flexibility in legal solutions for coping with cyberbullying, which happens when "kids treat one another awfully online", and he recommended that laws not be too tied to specific technologies.

He is a fan of Wikipedia:

He served as the vice-dean of library and information services at the Harvard Law School's library, and led a reorganization effort in 2009.

Beginning in 2010, he helped promote a Berkman project entitled the Digital Public Library of America, which is an effort funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and others to enable a large-scale public file-sharing digital library.

Palfrey described the online storehouse stocked with millions of digitized books as being one which "will contain everything we can get our hands on."

The project began by offering noncopyrighted material but there are efforts to offer copyrighted material in the future with a fee-based arrangement that compensates copyright holders.

Palfrey was the 15th Head of School at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts from 2012 to 2019.

In 2012, Palfrey became the head of school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.

He was the fifteenth person to serve as the academy's head of school, and his investiture was celebrated on September 26, 2012.

While at Andover, he was elected as the chairperson of the Knight Foundation, a charitable organization which focuses on how information can improve democratic institutions.

Palfrey served as the founding chairman of the Digital Public Library of America when it became a stand-alone entity, serving in that role until 2015.

Berkman, under his leadership, also initiated efforts to combat malware, spyware and computer viruses with a program called StopBadware.

He was profiled in Town and Country magazine in 2015.

During his tenure at Phillips Academy, the school was the only one of its kind to maintain need blind admissions and reached a high of 86 per cent admissions yield, setting records both for applications and yield.

Palfrey was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021.

Palfrey is regarded as an authority about how people use technology, including how they relate to information and engage in politics in emerging digital media such as the Internet.

In March 2019, he was named the president of the

MacArthur Foundation effective September 1, 2019.