In this volume celebrating 50 years of information technology at the Department of Law, Stockholm University, it is fitting for two reasons to examine the interplay between information technology and academic freedom during this ground-breaking period for. First, without academic freedom, the legal academy would never have in general developed much beyond traditional Roman law subjects such as the law of obligations, and definitely not to include something as cutting-edge as information technology already in the 1970’s. The second is that information technology has changed the faces of both teaching and research, and thus the premises for academic freedom, both facilitating and obstructing its exercise by legal scholars. Two specific challenges raised to academic freedom will be addressed at the end, one with respect to teaching, the copyright to teaching materials and the other with respect to research, the protections of extramural utterances, both as facilitated by digitalization and social media.

This article begins by briefly exploring the history of academic freedom, university research and teaching, as well as its modern legal protections, then goes over to the impact of information technology on academic freedom in four legal systems, the US, UK, Germany and Sweden. The need for the law regarding academic freedom to keep up with the technological-advances made in the past half century is not only self-evident, but also integral to future academic endeavors.