Lawrence Lessig

An op-ed by Lawrence Lessig. American politics is strikingly bi-polar. We are firmly divided. We are firmly united. Yet the dynamic of the divided part makes the union part almost irrelevant. We are divided by party. Democrats are as far from Republicans as they have ever been in modern American history. We are loyal to our tribe; we punish the disloyal. The machines of our social life  —  Facebook and Twitter  —  feed us ideas we like, and discipline us for deviance from those ideas. If we signal improperly, “friends” may “unfriend” us. So we speak as we should. “Hey, like me! Because, like you, I hate them.” Thus the politics of hate wired to our emotions. Yet at the same time, we are as united as we have ever been. Overwhelmingly, whether Democrat or Republican, we are angry with our government. Overwhelmingly, we see our “representatives” as not representing us.

A national campaign to impeach President Donald Trump has drawn some high-powered talent from legal academia. Two organizations, Free Speech for People and RootsAction.org, have joined forces behind Impeach Donald Trump Now, a grassroots petition drive that has collected thus far more than 1.2 million signatures, and a lobbying effort on behalf of a congressional resolution calling for an impeachment investigation. The campaign is aided by a 13-member legal advisory board, including: Harvard Law School’s Laurence Tribe and Lawrence Lessig...

...The US Constitution is the most difficult to alter of any in the world. Article V lays out two ways to propose amendments: with the support of two-thirds of both houses of Congress, or by a convention of states called by Congress upon the request of two-thirds of the states...Perhaps the most prominent opponent of Citizens United has been the Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, who ran a long-shot campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016. Given the impossibility of getting a “representational integrity” amendment passed in Congress, as well as the apparently successful conspiracy to keep the judicial branch in Republican hands for the foreseeable future, Lessig’s only hope rests with a convention of states. In a recent phone call, Lessig observed that the movement behind the Phoenix convention is strictly partisan and therefore likely to fail.

This week on Freak Out And Carry On, recorded live in front of an audience at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Ron Suskind and Heather Cox Richardson talk with Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig. They discuss reforming the electoral college, the gerrymandering case in front of the Supreme Court, and how to get money out of politics. They look back on the four presidents who won the electoral college but lost the popular vote and detail the 2000 Supreme Court case Bush v. Gore.

An interview with Lawrence Lessig. A Harvard Law professor said Hillary Clinton can still be made president if the Trump-Russia collusion story ends with a certain conclusion. Lawrence Lessig said he neither strongly believes it will or should happen, but explained that he explored the possibility after receiving several questions from the public. Lessig said that if there is conclusive evidence the Russians "stole" the election - by changing data, not minds through alleged advertisements - then there is a case for a Clinton presidency.

An op-ed by Lawrence Lessig. There’s a bunch of chatter about imminent action by the special prosecutor. Some of that chatter suggests evidence of a real tie with Russia during the election. By “real tie” I mean more than that the Russians tried to help. A “real tie” would be real evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia. I don’t know if I believe it. I certainly haven’t seen clear evidence of it. And I don’t think it’s appropriate to speculate about whether there is clear evidence of it or not.

An op-ed by Lawrence Lessig and Richard Painter. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer had just described a system in which “if party A wins a majority of votes, party A controls the legislature. That seems fair,” he said. Chief Justice John Roberts then jumped in: “If you need a convenient label for that approach,” Roberts offered, “you can call it ‘proportional representation,’ which has never been accepted as a political principle in the history of this country.” Most Americans would agree with Breyer that in a democracy, it is only “fair” that the party that gets more votes gets more seats. But Roberts was making a narrower point: His claim could not have been — because it would have been absurd — that in our tradition of representative democracy, the winner shouldn’t win.

Retailers selling mobile phones will continue to have to warn customers in the City of Berkeley about possible exposure to radiation from the devices, after a federal appeals court on Wednesday declined to revisit a ruling upholding the city’s rule...“The decision of the district court was correct — twice. The decision of the court of appeals was correct — now twice,” Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig, who argued for the city in the case, said in an email. “We are hopeful that this will bring an end to this case, and the City of Berkeley will again be free to govern its citizens as its citizens demand.”

Last month, representatives from 22 states gathered in Arizona to plan the nation’s first constitutional convention since 1787...“Our Constitution needs some pretty important repair and it’s absolutely clear Congress is never going to propose it,” says Lawrence Lessig, a left-leaning Harvard law professor and convention enthusiast. “In my view, [a convention] is the only option.”...For instance, says Harvard law professor Michael Klarman, “we have this Electoral College system which allows you to become president even though your opponent won two percent more of the vote — which is a lot of votes, 3 million votes.”

An interview with Lawrence Lessig. The results of the 2016 presidential election prompted many Americans to question the electoral college – a winner-takes-all system which empowers a group of 538 electors to name the next president of the United States. Equal representation, citizen-funded elections and equal access to the ballot are the three actionable steps towards change, suggests Equal Citizens, a nonprofit founded by renowned law professor Lawrence Lessig.

Last November, from his downtown Colorado Springs home, local math educator Bob Nemanich, one of the 538 members of the Electoral College, helped launch a movement to try to change the way the United States chooses its president. Nearly a year later, he is still fighting. Nemanich is named as a plaintiff in a federal lawsuit filed by national election law expert, Harvard Law School professor and attorney Lawrence Lessig, who briefly ran for president in 2016 before dropping out ahead of the Democratic primary...The legal action, filed in U.S. District Court in Denver, aims to answer a major question once and for all, before the 2020 presidential election: Do members of the Electoral College have a constitutional ability to vote for whomever they want? “Regardless of what you believe the law is, it’s really important that it be clear before the next election,” Lessig says.

The votes have been counted and President Trump has moved into the White House, but the campaign to upend the Electoral College is far from over...The idea is not to eliminate the Electoral College, which would require a constitutional amendment, but to require states to implement a system in which electors cast ballots based on the percentage of the popular vote. “It’s crazy that our nation’s least-democratic election is the one for president,” said Lawrence Lessig, Harvard Law School professor and founder of Equal Citizens.

T.J. is joined by two prominent election reform attorneys: Lawrence Lessig with Equal Citizens and Chad Peace with the Independent Voter Project. They discuss their latest reform lawsuits and projects, breaking down each case into its ‘elevator pitch’.

Micheal Baca has become the third Colorado presidential elector to join a federal lawsuit against Secretary of State Wayne Williams alleging Williams violated their constitutional rights by making threats and removing Baca as an elector ahead of the high-drama 2016 Electoral College vote...The lawsuit was announced in August by Equal Citizens, an advocacy group founded by Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, and filed on behalf of two Democratic electors, Polly Baca (unrelated to Micheal) and Robert Nemanich...“The Constitution vests in electors the choice for whom they will vote,” Lessig said in a news release Wednesday announcing Baca has joined the lawsuit.

The Colorado Electoral College member who went rogue by not casting an official ballot for Hillary Clinton in December is suing Secretary of State Wayne Williams claiming Williams violated his constitutional rights by removing and replacing him and not counting his vote...National election law expert and Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig filed the federal complaint in Denver district court in mid-August, and says he is filing a new one today adding Micheal Baca’s name...Lessig says the plaintiffs aren’t in the lawsuit for money and have capped their damages at a dollar. He says he hopes for a quick ruling that answers the question about whether members of the Electoral College can vote their consciences. “Regardless of what you believe the law is, it’s really important that it be clear before the next election,” he says.

The technologist who ran Donald Trump's automated ad campaign on Facebook says "unsupervised" software can bring out the best and worst of humanity. Darren Bolding, chief technology officer of Cambridge Analytica, told the crowd at the third annual Internet Summit in San Francisco on Thursday that "algorithms will find the worst in us if you let them go nuts." His comments came during an interview onstage with Harvard University law professor Lawrence Lessig in front of several hundred people gathered to hear him discuss the campaign.

The combination of huge amounts of personal data on all of us and tools to analyze it can do great good in medical and scientific applications. But the same technologies also threaten the social and political order of our country, critics say. Technology can be "the best and worst of times at the same time," said Harvard Law School professor (and former presidential candidate) Lawrence Lessig, speaking the Cloudflare Internet Summit Thursday in San Francisco. Lessig, who has long worried about the state of U.S. democracy, thinks that data science poses a new and dangerous threat.

Improbable Worlds Ltd., backed by SoftBank Group Corp.’s Vision Fund, said it’s in talks for major game publishers to adopt its virtual world simulation software...Some of the games using SpatialOS aim to offer more than entertainment. Berlin-based Klang Games has teamed up with Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig to create Seed, an MMO title billed as an experiment in governance. In the game, players collaborate in colonizing a planet, balancing economic needs and environment sustainability.

An interview with Lawrence Lessig. Before he started working with Aaron Swartz, the Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig built his professional life around internet law and copyright policy. In the early 2000s, Lessig was at the top of his academic field, then working at Stanford. As an undergraduate student, Swartz, who had met Lessig at a computer conference when he was just 14, convinced the professor to radically change his career path. The two developed a mentorship and partnership that would lead them to take on the complex goals of making information more accessible and demanding greater transparency from political institutions. Swartz became known for his involvement in Creative Commons and Reddit, and for his alleged attempt to make information from the academic-research site JSTOR free for public viewing. And then, in January of 2013, Swartz committed suicide.

Two members of Colorado’s Electoral College class of 2016 have filed a lawsuit against Secretary of State Wayne Williams saying the Republican intimidated them into casting votes for Hillary Clinton in December. The plaintiffs in the suit are former lawmaker Polly Baca and Colorado Springs math teacher Bob Nemanich. Nationally known Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig, a political activist who briefly ran for president in 2016 on a campaign finance reform platform, filed the suit in U.S. District Court in Colorado this week..."Our view is that they had a constitutional discretion, which Williams interfered with through voter intimidation,” Lessig told The Independent in an interview Tuesday. “Just like if he had been there at the polls and said if you vote for the Democrat I’m going to beat you up.”

A group of Boston-based mathematicians calling themselves the Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group are using their math superpowers to fight back against gerrymandering. They're holding a public event, the Geometry of Redistricting workshop, which begins on Monday. The workshop will feature lectures on legal and mathematical topics related to gerrymandering, as well as hands-on sessions on how to use open-source mapping software to redraw voting districts...Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard law professor and outspoken critic of our current districting system, agrees that technology has made things worse. "What's really important about this process is that big data, technology, has radically improved the efficiency by which the politicians are now able to draw and select these districts," he says.