Jonathan Zittrain - Family and Education

Family and Education

Zittrain is the son of two attorneys, Ruth A. Zittrain and Lester E. Zittrain. His father was the personal attorney of professional football star Joe Greene. In 2004 with Jennifer K. Harrison, Zittrain published The Torts Game: Defending Mean Joe Greene, a book the authors dedicated to their parents. His brother, Jeff, is an established Bay Area musician. His sister, Laurie Zittrain Eisenberg, is a scholar of the Arab and Israeli conflict and teaches at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He is unmarried and has no children.

Zittrain, who grew up in the suburb of Churchill outside of Pittsburgh, was graduated in 1987 from Shady Side Academy, a private school in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He holds a bachelor's summa cum laude in cognitive science and artificial intelligence from Yale University, 1991, where he was a member of the Yale Political Union, Manuscript Society and Davenport College, a J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, 1995, where he was the winner of the Williston Negotiation Competition, and a master of public administration from Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, 1995.

He was law clerk for Stephen F. Williams of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and served with the U.S. Department of Justice and, in 1991, with the Department of State, as well as at the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in 1992 and 1994. He was a longtime forum administrator, or sysop, for the online service CompuServe, serving for many years as the chief administrator for its private forum for all of its forum administrators.