Lawrence Lessig

An op-ed by Lawrence Lessig. I became a lawyer because of a story told to me about Watergate, by my uncle, Richard Cates. Cates was a lawyer from Madison. When the House started investigating Nixon, he was hired to be counsel to the House Committee on Impeachment. His job was to put together the facts supporting a case against Nixon, and convince the members of the House that those facts merited impeachment...As I watch the unfolding constitutional crisis in America (from Rwanda — badly planned leave!), I am fearful that our leaders don’t understand what the Watergate Congress saw. This looks not like adults addressing a crisis with calm and confidence; it looks like a circus, that can only weaken even further the fabric of our Republic.

...A celebration of Trump’s defeat on the day of his inauguration seems several stages beyond fanciful. The real estate billionaire did after all pull off one of the biggest electoral surprises of modern times. Yet the progressive inhabitants of Saranac Lake are not alone in such thinking. Across the country, a growing chorus of influential voices can be heard exhorting liberals not to wallow in despondency in the wake of the Trump ascendancy, but to embrace optimism and celebrate a victory of their own...Will President Trump hear all these messages as he takes his seat in the Oval Office? Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard law professor who made a brief bid in 2016 for the Democratic presidential nomination, predicts that Trump will ignore calls for him to show electoral humility, just as Bush did in 2001. “The Republicans are so good at the chutzpah of their claim to power – minority presidents acting as though they are dominant in the world. We have to develop a way of tamping down their arrogance – these are minority presidents who do not represent most Americans.”

Hillary Clinton’s top advisers never publicly backed an effort by Democrats on the Electoral College to block Donald Trump’s election. When it failed on Monday, one aide mocked it as an unserious “coup” attempt. But a batch of correspondence obtained by POLITICO shows members of Clinton’s inner circle — including senior aides Jake Sullivan and Jennifer Palmieri — were in touch for weeks with one of the effort’s organizers as they mounted their ill-fated strategy. And despite repeated requests for guidance, Clinton’s team did not wave them off...Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard University constitutional law professor deeply involved in recruiting Republicans to rebel against Trump, said he sensed a Clinton team that was undecided about “to what extent they should be encouraging this.” “I imagine that in the end, nobody was sure they could survive the political blowback if you became president because you flipped the college,” he said.

On Monday, the 538 members of the Electoral College met in their respective states to cast votes to confirm Donald Trump as the next president of the United States. But this year, the presidential candidate who won the popular vote by a significant margin did not win the Electoral College, raising old questions about a system that’s usually taken for granted..Lawrence Lessig, Former Presidential Candidate: Our goal is to let the electors exercise their judgment. The Electoral College was made for this election, precisely.

Colorado’s Republican secretary of state is brushing aside a federal ruling that questioned his authority to remove presidential electors who defy the statewide popular vote, setting up a potential legal clash less than two days before the Electoral College meets to choose the president...Lemley is part of Electors Trust, a group of prominent constitutional lawyers — including Harvard University’s Larry Lessig — advising electors who wish to break from Trump. They celebrated Friday’s appeals court decision as the first evidence ever issued by a federal court to suggest electors may be constitutionally free to vote for whoever they want...Laurence Tribe, who isn’t officially affiliated with the group but has lent support, agreed that the 10th Circuit ruling should take precedence over Colorado’s law. “This is a federal constitutional issue. The text of Article II and the 12th Amendment, and the reasoning of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, carry far more weight than the state court's opinion here,” he said.

...Harvard University constitutional law professor Lawrence Lessig earlier this week suggested as many as 20 Republican electors were considering changing their minds about Trump, though that report has not been confirmed...Many constitutional lawyers question whether those laws are constitutionally enforceable. However, the effort to allow the electors to vote their conscience was dealt a blow earlier this week when a Colorado judge ruled that electors in that state were not allowed to switch their votes. Given the hurdles, the anti-Trump revolt is unlikely to succeed, admits Larry Tribe, another professor at Harvard Law School. But Tribe insists that electors “have a responsibility to the country and the Constitution, in extreme enough situations.” “And I think this is a pretty extreme situation,” he said.

Lawyer Larry Lessig, who briefly ran for president in 2016, discusses why electors shouldn't vote for Donald Trump even though he handily won the electoral college.

Larry Lessig, a Harvard University constitutional law professor who made a brief run for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, claimed Tuesday that 20 Republican members of the Electoral College are considering voting against Donald Trump, a figure that would put anti-Trump activists more than halfway toward stalling Trump’s election. Lessig’s anti-Trump group, “Electors Trust,” has been offering pro bono legal counsel to Republican presidential electors considering ditching Trump and has been acting as a clearinghouse for electors to privately communicate their intentions. “Obviously, whether an elector ultimately votes his or her conscience will depend in part upon whether there are enough doing the same. We now believe there are more than half the number needed to change the result seriously considering making that vote,” Lessig said.

An op-ed by Lawrence Lessig: In 2000, Republican lawyers, desperately seeking a way to stop the recount in Florida, crafted a brilliant equal protection argument against the method by which the Florida courts were recounting votes. Before that election, no sane student of the Constitution would have thought that there was such a claim. When the claim was actually made, every sane lawyer (on Gore’s side at least) thought it was a sure loser. But by a vote of 7 to 2, the Supreme Court recognized the claim, and held that the Equal Protection Clause regulated how Florida could recount its votes. That conclusion led five justices to conclude the recount couldn’t continue. George Bush became president.

Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig will support members of the Electoral College who don't cast their vote the president-elect. NPR's Scott Simon asks him why he's decided to take up this cause..."What we're trying to do is to give counsel to electors who are trying to exercise what the constitution gives them the right to exercise, which is, as Justice Jackson said, independent, nonpartisan judgment when they decide who to elect and who to vote for."

Are you a Florida presidential elector? Thinking of not voting for Donald Trump? Larry Lessig wants to have a word with you. “Our view is that it doesn’t make sense for an elector to stand out if you’re number 5 standing out,” Lessig said. “But if you’re number 39 standing out? That’s important.” Lessig, a Harvard Law School professor and activist who briefly ran for the Democratic nomination for president in 2015, is offering to provide free, confidential legal advice to presidential electors about the legal ramifications of not voting for Trump – even if their state voted for him, as Florida did...“The Constitution creates electors and protects them to have the freedom to vote their conscience once selected by a state,” Lessig said in a phone interview Wednesday with the Orlando Sentinel.

A new organization is offering pro bono legal assistance to any Electoral College member who decides to break with the will of the people in his or her state, in hopes of derailing President-elect Donald Trump before he is sworn in. The vote to determine who will become president is set to take place on Dec. 19. Christopher Suprun, a paramedic who lives in Texas and is one of the 538 members of the Electoral College, announced this week that he will not cast his vote for the president-elect. Larry Lessig, a Harvard Law School professor heading the project, told The Huffington Post that the law firm Durie Tangri handles intake and may wind up representing Suprun. Durie Tangri generally plans to offer confidential advice to anonymous electors, but Lessing said Suprun’s case was different. “He came to us just as he published his piece in the Times,” he said. “Our assumption is we’re talking to people who want to be anonymous, so he’s an exception. The whole community is going to step in and do what they can to help him.”

Lawrence Lessig, activist, Harvard law professor, and author of Republic, Lost: The Corruption of Equality and the Steps to End It (Twelve, 2015), and Walter Olson, senior fellow at Cato Institute’s Center for Constitutional Studies, preview their debate over the wisdom of convening another Constitutional Convention. Could it bypass the gridlock in Congress?

An op-ed by Lawrence Lessig. My friend and colleague Noah Feldman is angry that I would be so “cavalier” about “following the procedures … that shape our constitutional norms.” In my view, however, it is in understanding those procedures that we should be most careful not to be cavalier. I—along with many others—believe the electors were intended to be something more than mere cogs. That they instead were to exercise judgment in deciding how to cast their ballots. Noah disagrees with this conventional view. The college’s “purpose,” he tells us, “is simply to effectuate the results of the electoral system we have.” That certainly is the view among the commentators and pundits. But that claim needs more support if it is to dislodge the view of many scholars, including, for example, our colleague Larry Tribe (“electors are free to vote their conscience”) and the extensive analysis of Columbia Professor Richard Briffault.

With Hillary Clinton’s lead surpassing President-elect Donald Trump by two million in the popular vote, the role of the electoral college is being debated everywhere. Constitutional law scholar and Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig made the case in a recent Washington Post piece that the electors should reflect the people’s choice, and avoid “loophole presidents.” Lessig spoke to Jim Braude and Margery Eagan on Boston Public Radio over the phone while on a trip to Iceland. Highlights below.

Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig sparked a national debate with a Nov. 24 Washington Post op-ed arguing that members of the electoral college should choose as president popular vote winner Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump on the grounds that everyone's vote should count equally. A number of his colleagues within the legal academy have now weighed in with their own opinion pieces and blog posts, and most warn that such a move by the electors would be unfair and damaging—or at least contrary to the intentions of the Founding Fathers.

An op-ed by Lawrence Lessig. Conventional wisdom tells us that the electoral college requires that the person who lost the popular vote this year must nonetheless become our president. That view is an insult to our framers. It is compelled by nothing in our Constitution. It should be rejected by anyone with any understanding of our democratic traditions  — most important, the electors themselves.

Dr. Lawrence Lessig is more than just another academic with a keen interest in Iceland. He has also been following Iceland’s experiment with a constitutional draft for years now, has written extensively on the subject, and has visited the country on a number of occasions to meet and consult with the people working most closely with the process. In the run-up to the parliamentary elections, the constitutional draft was a subject raised by a number of parties, so we touched base with Dr. Lessig to get his thoughts on what this draft means, and why it matters not just to Iceland, but possibly to the rest of the world.