Berkman Fellow Urs Gasser Earns Prestigious Professor Walther Hug-Preis Schweiz Award

On Monday, Berkman Fellow Dr. Urs Gasser (LL.M. '03) receives for his doctoral thesis (S.J.D. degree) in Information Law the "Professor Walther Hug-Preis Schweiz," a prize awarded by the Swiss-based Professor Walther Hug Foundation for the best dissertation nationwide.  Professor Walther Hug (1898-1980), himself a Harvard Law School graduate (S.J.D. '29) and early in his career an Associate Professor at HLS, initiated the foundation in order to encourage outstanding legal scholarship.

In his thesis, Urs has explored from a multi-disciplinary perspective whether the characteristics of "information" as a possible subject of regulation call for a paradigm shift in law with regard to basic "cause-effect"-assumptions underlying both law-making processes and legal reasoning.  In 2002, Urs received for his summa cum laude thesis "Causalty of and Responsibility for Information as a Legal Problem" the "Walther Hug-Preis St. Gallen" of the University of St. Gallen, awarded for the best doctoral thesis in the fields of law and public affairs of the current academic year, as well as the "Rudolf Maeder-Preis" for the best doctorate in law and public affairs of the current academic year.