Henry H. Perritt, Jr.

Henry H. Perritt, Jr., is a Professor of Law at Chicago-Kent College of Law, part of the Illinois Institute of Technology. He served as Chicago-Kent’s dean from 1997 to 2002. He was the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives in the Tenth District of Illinois in 2002 while on leave from Chicago-Kent. Throughout his academic career, Perritt has made it possible for groups of law and engineering students to work together to build a rule of law, promote the free press, assist in economic development, and provide refugee aid in the former Yugoslavia through “Project Bosnia” and “Operation Kosovo,” and to build links with educational and governmental institutions in China and Mexico. Professor Perritt is the author of more than seventy law review articles and fifteen books on international relations and law, technology and law, and employment law, including the 730-page Law and the Information Superhighway. He is currently working on a book about the Kosovo Liberation Army, seeking to identify universal features of insurgencies, including those employing terrorism. He served on President Clinton’s Transition Team, working on telecommunications issues, and drafted principles for electronic dissemination of public information, which formed the core of the Electronic Freedom of Information Act Amendments adopted by Congress in 1996. During the Ford administration, he served on the White House staff and as deputy under secretary of labor. Professor Perritt served on the Computer Science and Telecommunications Policy Board of the National Research Council, and on a National Research Council committee on “Global Networks and Local Values.” He was a member of the interprofessional team that evaluated the FBI’s Carnivore system. He serves as a neutral for the World Intellectual Property Organization’s domain-name dispute resolution service. He is a member of the bars of Virginia, Pennsylvania, the District of Columbia, Maryland, Illinois, and the United States Supreme Court. He is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations and of the Economic Club, is on the board of directors of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, and has served as secretary of the Section on Labor and Employment Law of the American Bar Association. Professor Perritt earned his B.S. in engineering from MIT in 1966, a master’s degree in management from MIT’s Sloan School in 1970, and a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center in 1975.