I was catching up reading Lessig's blog and I saw a post about a talk given in Sao Paolo. Various great thinkers were there, one of whom apparently was Manuel Castells.
In Berkeley he was one of the luminaries who helped shape my thinking. Although I never took a course with him formally (he mostly taught graduate students, though I have a recollection of him letting me audit one of his seminars) he affected my intellectual development in other ways. For one, he influenced professors I did take courses with, like Francois Bar. For another, he advised me when I was working on my thesis. One suggestion he made in particular was to refer me to the work of Everett Rogers, who wrote heavily on the diffusion of innovations.
He also influenced me by simply paying attention to me. He indulged my scrawny little undergraduate intellect and exposed it to big ideas, ideas that though I wasn't quite ready to fully understand yet in whose company my intellectual horizons were nonetheless raised.
It's now years later and the effect of those ideas continues to ripple through my thinking and evolving legal practice. How could one really contemplate the legal regulation of technology without also understanding its function within and effect upon society? The thinking he inspired in these areas is no less relevant now that I'm in the legal field than they were when I worked in the sociological one.