Mourning Professor Greg Lastowka

Acting Dean Oberdiek reported today the tragic news that Professor Greg Lastowka died late last night, “surrounded by his wife Carol and their sons Adam and Daniel, following a courageous year-long battle against a rare and aggressive form of throat cancer.”  As a member of the faculty since 2004, Greg was a leading scholar of intellectual property and cyberlaw, a field which he helped to create, authoring Virtual Justice: The New Laws of Online Worlds, published in 2010 by Yale University Press, as well as numerous articles.  He was widely recognized for his path-breaking research, earning a Rutgers Board of Trustees Research Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence as well as a National Science Foundation grant to study online user-generated content.  Greg lectured around the world and collaborated widely with other legal scholars and scholars in communications, media studies, and gaming.  Greg’s students loved him.  His evaluations are replete with superlatives like “amazing” and “fantastic,” and lines like, “I have enjoyed most of my professors here at Rutgers, but Professor Lastowka is by far the best.”  Greg taught us all though his brave approach to his illness.  He continued to come into the law school to teach whenever he could.  He fought for life with all his might, but accepted the limits of medicine with grace.  Mostly, he showed love.  Love for his family, for his fellow beings, for art and creativity, and for the beautiful world he enjoyed every day.    Greg helped found RIIPL, was a constant inspiration and source of ideas.  We will miss him every day.  Information about memoria will be forthcoming.