A $5.4 million gift and bequest to Harvard Law School (HLS) will bolster the law school's study of business and cyberspace law, officials announced yesterday.

The donation from the late Jack N. Berkman, who graduated from the Law School in 1929, and his wife, Lillian R. Berkman, is one of the five largest gifts in the school's history, said Michael J. Chmura, HLS news director.

The donation will support the School's Center for Internet and Society, which was established last year.

The Center will be renamed after the Berkmans.

The Berkmans' gift will also endow the newly-created Jack N. and Lillian R. Berkman Professorship for Entrepreneurial Legal Studies.

Lawrence Lessig, a specialist in technology and Internet law who joined the Faculty last year, will be the first Berkman Professor.

Lessig said cyberspace is an important, emerging field of law.

Jack Berkman founded the Associated Communications Corporation, now called The Associated Group. The company has holdings in radio, television and cellular telephones. Its subsidiary company, Teligent, develops fiber-optic technology.

Lillian Berkman, who is a vice president of The Associated Group, said she believes it is important for corporations to reinvest in academics.

"It's essential, because so many of the Law School graduates go into business," she said. "Progress will certainly be made through new forms of communications."

According the Center's web site, its mission is "to explore and understand cyberspace, its development, dynamics, norms, standards, and need or lack thereof for laws and standards."

The same legal questions are present on the Internet, Lessig said, but the new field asks "whether the different context means you should give different answers to the same questions."

Among the Center's programs is a "cyberschool," which offers fully online, non-credit classes to the public.

The first such class, on privacy in cyberspace, is being taught by Arthur R. Miller, Bromley professor of law.

Information about the Berkman Center can be accessed on the World Wide Web at http://cyber.harvard.edu.