Peter M. Shane
Peter M. Shane
Executive Director (2008-2009)
Peter M. Shane, the Executive Director of the Knight Commission from 2008-2009, is the Jacob E. Davis and Jacob E. Davis II Chair in Law at the Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law, where he also directs the Project on Law and Democratic Development. In addition, he serves as Distinguished Service Professor (Adjunct) of Law and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University’s H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management, where he was the founding director of the Institute for the Study of Information Technology and Society (InSITeS).
An internationally recognized authority on constitutional and administrative law, Peter has been dubbed by one blogger as “a major figure in the e-democracy movement” because of his work on the use of new information technologies to expand opportunities for the general public to participate meaningfully in the formulation of public policy. With Professor Stephen Coleman of the University of Leeds, he co-chairs the NSF-supported International Working Group on Online Consultation and Public Policy Making (IWG). The IWG has launched the (R)E-connecting Democracy Project, analyzing the policy and other social impacts of online citizen consultation initiatives aimed at influencing actual government decision making.
From 2002-2006, Peter was Principal Investigator for the NSF-funded Virtual Agora Project, a software engineering and social science project designed to shed light on the dynamics of online and face-to-face deliberation.
Peter is a familiar public commentator on constitutional and legal affairs. He has been interviewed on both The Jim Lehrer NewsHour and C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, and his op-eds have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, Christian Science Monitor, Chicago Tribune, Newsday, and other major newspapers.
A graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School, Professor Shane clerked for the Hon. Alvin B. Rubin of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He served as an attorney-adviser in the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel and as an assistant general counsel in the Office of Management and Budget, before entering full-time teaching in 1981 at the University of Iowa. He has visited at Duke, Boston College, and Villanova Law Schools, and was the inaugural “Visiting Foreign Chair” for the University of Ghent Program in Foreign and Comparative Law in Ghent, Belgium, in 2001.
Peter was dean of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law from 1994 to 1998, when, following a national survey, he was cited by Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, published by the American Association for Higher Education, as one of 40 “Young Leaders of the Academy” – the only law dean on the list. From 2003-2007, he directed the Center for Interdisciplinary Law and Policy Studies at Ohio State University.
Recent books include Peter M. Shane, Ed., Democracy Online: The Prospects For Political Renewal Through The Internet (Routledge, 2004), And Peter M. Shane, John Podesta And Richard C. Leone, Eds., A Little Knowledge: Privacy, Security And Public Information After September 11 (Century Foundation Press, 2004). Peter chairs the Board of Editors of I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society, and is a board member of both the Journal of Information Technology and Politics and the Journal of Public Deliberation.
