SCN: EPIC

[Steve]

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(Carl S. Kaplan, NY Times)---When the Electronic Privacy Information 
Center, an advocacy group based in Washington that loudly 
campaigns for Internet privacy and civil liberties, announced it had 
received a $1 million gift a few weeks ago, the money didn't come 
from a large corporation or private foundation. It came from 
someone who usually receives grants -- a law school professor.  

But then again, Pamela Samuelson is not just any professor. A 
leading cyberlaw expert and intellectual property scholar at the 
University of California at Berkeley, she is using her personal 
wealth to promote the public interest in the Internet legal battles now 
being waged in courts, legislatures and administrative agencies 
across the country.  

Earlier this year the Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy 
clinic opened at UC Berkeley's School of Law (Boalt Hall). The 
program, which has a full-time director, is one of the first in the 
country to allow law students to work on key matters in Internet 
arena. Students can file friend-of-the-court briefs in important cases, 
draft model legislation and provide legal assistance to individuals 
filing lawsuits against corporations and government agencies.  

To fund the clinic, Samuelson and her husband, Robert Glushko, an 
engineer at Commerce One, an e-commerce services and software 
provider, donated $2 million. In addition, Mitchell Kapor, founder of 
Lotus Development Corp., kicked in $300,000, as did the New York-
based Markle Foundation, headed by Zoe Baird, a Boalt Hall alum.  

The idea may be catching on. Stanford Law School started a student 
clinic in cyberlaw this year under the direction of Professor 
Lawrence Lessig, a leading scholar in the field. Harvard Law School 
has operated a similar program since 1998.  

At Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), the second link in 
Samuelson's public interest plan, the law professor's gift will be 
used to set up a paid summer internship program for 8-10 law 
students.  

"We want there to be places where people who are interested in 
high tech public interest law can do it and earn money" during the 
summer, as a counter-weight to summer jobs at law firms, said 
Samuelson, who has a joint appointment at UC Berkeley's School of 
Information Management and Systems as well as in the School of 
Law, where she is a co-director of the Berkeley Center for Law and 
Technology.  

Marc Rotenberg, EPIC's executive director, said he's already 
received over 150 applications from students around the country. 
This summer's slots are filled, he said, but openings are available 
for student externships for next fall.  

Meanwhile, Samuelson and her husband are looking to fund other 
public interest Internet law clinics at law schools.  

"I actually look at this strategically," she said in a wide-ranging 
recent telephone interview. "Where is stuff happening and where do 
the clinics need to be? A lot of issues arise in the [United States 
Court of Appeals for the] Second Circuit, in Manhattan, especially in 
the copyright area, and we want to see a clinic there but we don't 
have a proposal yet." She added that it would be "great" to establish 
a law-school clinic in the Los Angeles area, where many 
entertainment corporations are based. She is also looking at funding 
a law school-affiliated clinic in the Washington, D.C. area, she 
added.  

Why pour millions of dollars into student clinics? Samuelson rattles 
off the answers like a lawyer arguing a point. She has a very strong 
sense that the public interest is underrepresented in a lot of high-
tech policy debates and lawsuits, she said. "Congress discovered 
Silicon Valley a few years ago and Silicon Valley discovered 
Congress. When there is a high-tech issue Congress asks, 'What 
does Silicon Valley want? Let's find out.' So we need an institutional 
structure . . . to promote the public interest."  

She also hopes that her efforts will tap into the idealism of many 
current law students and offer them a chance to help shape Internet 
law. The programs may also have ripple effects, she added. "I hope 
that students who are not involved in the clinics hear about them. I 
hope they'll say, 'Hey, there really is a public interest out there. 
Maybe when we go to work for law firms or companies we should 
remember that there is a public interest out there."  

Jonathan Zittrain, an Internet law expert at Harvard Law School, said 
it's important for students at cyberlaw clinics to take on cases that 
would not otherwise reach the courts. "A case gets the wheels of 
public policy working," he said. "You get a verdict and that can 
inspire legislative change. Even if you lose the battle, a legal 
controversy can invite the public eye. There's nothing like a good 
case to focus attention on an issue. It's concrete, you've got a story, 
alleged harm and a resolution."  

Though she is not well known to the public, Samuelson is a high-
profile scholar in the world of Internet law. A recurring theme in 
many of her legal writings has been an attack on the over-protection 
of intellectual property in the digital age by corporations and a 
defense of the individual consumer's right to make private, 
noncommercial uses of information. In one speech she gave at an 
academic conference in 1998, for example, she said she was 
engaged in a long-term intellectual project of "designing a copyright 
policy for an information society in which it would be good to live 
[in]." But in the interview she said that is not the full story.  

"Some people perceive me as advocating a public interest or little-
guy perspective, but that is not how I perceive myself," she said. "A 
lot of the work I've been doing is work I felt needed to be done 
because the establishment interests are very well represented and 
pretty good at getting their message out. If I've started to talk about 
the wider public interest, and about imposing some limits on high-
tech projectionist initiatives that Hollywood, Microsoft or other big 
companies might want . . . I've ended up doing it not because my 
heart is there specifically but to keep a dialog going and to strike a 
balance."  

Samuelson, 52, grew up in Washington State and graduated from 
the University of Hawaii. After graduating from Yale Law School in 
1976, she practiced commercial law for four years at Willkie Farr & 
Gallagher, a New York law firm, then departed to become a law 
professor at the University of Pittsburgh. She took up her duties at 
UC Berkeley in 1996 and, in 1997, she was named a "genius" fellow 
of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.  

Reflecting on her decision to leave law-firm life early in her career, 
she recalled that she had never aspired to be a law professor. "But 
what I discovered at Willkie Farr," she said, "is that the problems 
didn't cease to be interesting when the case settled. It seemed like 
law teaching might be a way to investigate as fully as I thought 
appropriate some interesting issues that the law presented."  

Samuelson met her husband in 1987, when he was affiliated with 
Carnegie Mellon, and the pair married a year later. They hit the 
jackpot in 1999 following the initial public offering of stock in 
Commerce One. Glushko co-founded a Silicon Valley start-up that 
was later acquired by Commerce One.  

Samuelson declined to characterize the extent of her assets, but 
she did acknowledge that she and her husband have given away a 
higher proportion of their resources than do most people in their 
circumstances. In other recent gifts, she and her husband have 
donated $1 million to fund graduate student fellowships at UC 
Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems. They 
also donated a similar amount to the University of Washington, in 
the name of Samuelson's grandmother, to fund student fellowships 
for women interested in studying science and technology.  

Some people in Samuelson's position might chuck it all and retire to 
Italy. "That has crossed my mind," she said. But then she stopped 
laughing: "I want to leave a positive legacy, something more than 
'She wrote all these law review articles.'"  

Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company  



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