On my left: the edge of the off-ramp, a modest guardrail, and a fifty-foot drop. On my right, inching closer: a tractor-trailer determined to occupy my lane. I hit the brakes. The truck kept rolling. Its wheels pressed into my car as it wedged me against the curb and carved a tail-to-nose dent in my poor Toyota.
This was early 2015, on my commute to Cambridge, Mass., the morning of a critical meeting at Harvard Law School, where I worked. Harvard professor Jonathan Zittrain and l were sitting down with Daniel Lewis and Nik Reed, the founders of a legal research startup named Ravel Law, along with lawyers from Harvard’s Office of General Counsel, Debevoise & Plimpton and Gundersen Dettmer. We’d all been working for over a year on a contract that would make it possible, someday in the future, for everyone to have free and open access to all the
