Jack Balkin

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Jack M. Balkin is the Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School. He is also Director of the school's Information Society Project (ISP), a research center whose mission is "to study the implications of the Internet, telecommunications, and the new information technologies on law and society."

Balkin was born on August 13, 1956 in Kansas City, Missouri. He received his A.B. and J.D. degrees from Harvard University and his Ph.D in philosophy from Cambridge University.

Balkin's 1998 book, Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology, showed how ideology could be explained in terms of memes and processes of cultural evolution. He argued that ideology is an effect of the "cultural software" or tools of understanding that become part of human beings and which are produced through the evolution and transmission of memes.

Balkin coined the term "ideological drift" to describe a phenomenon by which ideas and concepts change their political valence as they are introduced into new social and political contexts over time. Along with Duncan Kennedy, Balkin developed the field of legal semotics. Legal semiotics shows how legal arguments feature [recurrent tropes] or [topoi] that respond to each other and whose opposition is reproduced at higher and lower levels of doctrinal detail as legal doctrines evolve. Hence Balkin claimed that legal argument has a self-similar ["crystalline"] or fractal structure. Balkin employed deconstruction and related literary theories to argue that legal thought was structured in terms of "nested oppositions"-- opposed ideas or concepts which turn into each other over time or otherwise depend on each other in novel and unexpected ways. Although he draws on literary theory in his work on legal rhetoric, Balkin and his frequent co-author Sanford Levinson contend law is best analogized not to literature but to the performing arts such as music and drama.

Balkin's work on the first amendment argues that the purpose of the free speech principle is to promote what he calls a ["democratic culture."] The idea of democratic culture is broader than a concern with democratic deliberation or democratic self-government, and emphasizes individual freedom, cultural participation and mutual influence. A democratic culture is one in which ordinary individuals can participate in the forms of culture that in turn help shape and constitute them as persons. Balkin argues that free speech on the Internet is characterized by two features: "routing around" media gatekeepers and "glomming on," i.e., non-exclusive appropriation of cultural content that is melded with other sources to create new forms of culture. These distinctive features of Internet speech, he argues, are actually features of speech in general and thus lead to a focus on democratic participation in culture.

Balkin is the editor of several books, including What Roe v. Wade Should Have Said (NYU Press 2002 ISBN 0814799183), and What Brown v. Board of Education Should Have Said (NYU Press 2002 ISBN 081479890X).

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