Harvard Berkman Klein Center: Internet Law Meets Blockchain Governance

When the internet emerged as a mass phenomenon in the 1990s, legal scholars struggled with a fundamental question: does a technology that enables borderless, decentralised communication require entirely new legal frameworks, or can existing law be adapted? The Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard — founded in 1997 — became the pre-eminent institution for working through that question. Three decades later, it is working through the same question for blockchain: does a technology that enables borderless, decentralised financial transactions and self-executing contracts require new legal frameworks, or can existing law be adapted?

The answer Berkman Klein’s researchers are developing — that blockchain requires new legal thinking but not necessarily new law from scratch — is shaping how courts and regulators conceptualise smart contracts, DAOs, and tokenized assets in ways that pure financial law analysis cannot.

The Internet Governance Heritage

Berkman Klein’s institutional identity is built around the proposition that internet technologies require analysis at the intersection of law, technology, and society — not just in any one of those domains alone. The Centre houses lawyers who understand code, technologists who understand legal doctrine, and social scientists who study how technology reshapes human institutions. This interdisciplinary integration is genuinely rare in academic institutions, most of which house technical and legal faculties in separate buildings with separate cultures.

Jonathan Zittrain, one of the Centre’s founders and a permanent intellectual presence there, established the framework that the Centre applies to new technologies: the question is not just what the technology can do, but what kind of social order it makes possible, and what governance structures are appropriate for that order. Applied to blockchain, this means asking not just “is a DAO a legal entity?” but “what kind of social order do DAOs create, and what governance principles should apply to that order?”

This broader framing produces more useful analysis for legislators and regulators than narrower technical legal questions, because it situates specific regulatory choices within a larger understanding of what the technology is for and what social arrangements it enables.

Primavera de Filippi and Blockchain Law

The central figure in Berkman Klein’s blockchain work is Primavera de Filippi, a researcher whose career bridges the Centre’s internet law heritage and the emerging field of blockchain governance. De Filippi’s work — most comprehensively laid out in Blockchain and the Law: The Rule of Code, co-authored with Aaron Wright — establishes the foundational analysis that smart contracts and blockchain governance systems constitute a new form of law-making, distinct from state law, that the legal system must learn to engage with rather than simply override.

The “rule of code” concept — that blockchain systems create self-executing rules that operate outside of state enforcement mechanisms — is now central to how courts and regulators think about smart contracts and DAOs. When a court encounters a DAO governance dispute, the question of whether the DAO’s on-chain governance mechanism has any legal standing is precisely the question de Filippi’s work addresses. When a regulator considers whether a smart contract that automatically executes a financial transaction is subject to securities law, the question of how state law applies to code-as-law is foundational.

De Filippi’s affiliation with Berkman Klein — a Harvard institution with deep regulatory credibility — gives this analysis a platform and legitimacy that equivalent work produced by a crypto-native research institution would not carry. The analysis is more likely to be read by federal judges’ clerks, Treasury officials, and congressional staffers because it arrives with Harvard’s institutional imprimatur.

DAO Governance Research

The Berkman Klein Centre has produced some of the most rigorous academic work on DAO governance — the question of how decentralised organisations with token-based voting systems actually make decisions, resolve disputes, and interact with legal requirements. This is not an abstract question: it is the central design problem for every major DeFi protocol and many tokenization ventures.

The Centre’s DAO research addresses questions including: How should DAOs be legally structured to give token holders meaningful rights without creating unintended securities law implications? What happens when a DAO’s on-chain governance decision conflicts with a legal obligation in a specific jurisdiction? How should DAOs handle employment relationships, tax obligations, and contract enforcement when their membership is pseudonymous and globally distributed?

These questions are increasingly live in US and European regulatory discussions. The Wyoming DAO LLC legislation — which gave DAOs a legal wrapper under state law — drew directly on academic frameworks developed in part through Berkman Klein-affiliated research. EU discussions about DAO legal personality in the MiCA framework similarly engaged with the foundational analysis that Berkman Klein researchers had established.

The Internet Law Lens and Why It Matters

Financial lawyers brought to crypto regulation the concepts of securities, commodities, and payment systems — frameworks developed for assets, derivative contracts, and money transmission systems in a world of intermediaries and jurisdictional boundaries. These frameworks produce certain answers to crypto questions, but they often miss what is actually novel about the technology.

Internet law scholars bring a different lens: they have already worked through what happens when technology enables borderless, pseudonymous, intermediary-free exchange of information. The insights from that experience — about the limits of territorial jurisdiction, the challenge of imposing liability on decentralised systems, the governance of platforms that host speech — transfer imperfectly but usefully to blockchain.

Specifically, Berkman Klein’s researchers bring the concept of “code is law” as something to be taken seriously rather than dismissed, the experience of the intermediary liability debates (Section 230 in the US context) as a precedent for how law can engage with decentralised systems, and the tradition of questioning whether territorial law is adequate for technologies that operate across borders.

This lens is most valuable precisely where financial law’s frameworks break down: DeFi protocols that have no identifiable operator, DAOs that have no legal person making decisions, and tokenized assets that exist on global blockchains outside any single jurisdiction’s control.

Influence and Limitations

Berkman Klein’s influence operates primarily through academic publication, conference engagement, and the informal networks that connect Harvard researchers to regulatory agencies, congressional staff, and international bodies. It does not lobby, does not represent industry clients, and does not file amicus briefs as an institution. Its influence is therefore slower and less targeted than that of industry groups, but potentially more durable: legal frameworks shaped by Berkman Klein’s foundational analysis persist long after any specific lobbying campaign has ended.

The Centre’s limitation is the limitation of academic interdisciplinarity in a policy environment: its outputs are often more nuanced than policymakers can use, and its reluctance to advocate for specific outcomes means that its research is cited by multiple sides of regulatory debates. De Filippi’s work on the rule of code, for instance, is cited both by those arguing that blockchain governance should be recognised by law and by those arguing that it must be brought under legal control.

For students of tokenization policy, Berkman Klein’s research provides the foundational legal conceptual vocabulary — the categories and frameworks through which novel blockchain governance questions are being thought about. That is an influence that operates invisibly but pervasively in every serious legal analysis of DAOs, smart contracts, and tokenized assets.