Lawrence Lessig

An op-ed by Lawrence Lessig. U.S. Rep. David Jolly, a Republican from Indian Shores, has generated enormous enthusiasm for his Stop Act — a proposal to ban members of Congress from personally asking people for money. "60 Minutes" did a special segment about the idea. That followed an incredibly powerful piece by comedian John Oliver describing with perfect clarity just how absurd the system has become. From my own survey of research, we know that members of Congress can spend anywhere between 30 percent and 70 percent of their time raising money. Even at the low end of that estimate, this should astonish anyone. Critics are wrong to call this a "do-nothing Congress." To the contrary, it does an incredible amount — of fundraising. That life of fundraising changes the members of Congress. How could it be otherwise? If you spent half of your time sucking up to powerful and wealthy people, you'd be changed, too.

Police arrested Harvard Law professor and former presidential candidate Lawrence Lessig last week during protests focused on campaign finance reform in Washington, D.C. Organized by the nonpartisan group Democracy Spring, a movement dedicated to campaign finance reform and supporting disadvantaged voters, the week-long sit-in protest in the nation’s capital came in the midst of this election cycle's primary season. ...“We have not embraced the fundamental fact that we need to change the way campaigns are funded,” Lessig said in an interview with the Young Turks posted over the weekend. “We need to spend public money on campaigns because whoever funds campaigns gets to call the tune.”

Police arrested hundreds of people protesting the influence of money in politics this week in Washington, D.C., but peaceful tangles with the officers were one of the group's main goals. U.S. Capitol Police arrested more than 900 protesters through Saturday afternoon. The mass demonstrations called "Democracy Spring" began Monday...Harvard Law School professor and former Democratic presidential candidate Larry Lessig was arrested Friday — for the first time ever. "I'm a law professor," he said Saturday. "I don't get arrested." But he made an exception for the issue that he based his short-lived campaign on: Campaign finance reform. "I’m so incredibly excited with the kind of passion and the mix of people that were there," said Lessig, noting it's spread beyond the usual "law geeks and intellectuals" who rally around campaign finance reform.

Chanting, "Money ain't speech, corporations aren't people!" and "We are the 99 percent!" around 425 protesters were arrested Monday in a mass sit-in on the steps of the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., and more have returned to face arrest Tuesday. The demonstration, called Democracy Spring, is advocating a set of reforms the organizers have dubbed the "democracy movement," demanding Congress amend campaign finance laws and restore the Voting Rights Act, among other actions...Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law School professor and a frequent activist in campaign finance who briefly ran for president this year on the issue, largely agrees. "What excites me about this movement is that it's talking about things that Congress can do tomorrow," Lessig says..."The clever idea here is that each day there's the same type of action, ultimately culminating in the same arrest," says Lessig. "The question is, what will the police do when they realize there's a pattern here, and whether they're going to take other steps."

It was raining lightly when marchers of the Democracy Spring coalition set out Saturday, trudging past Independence Hall in Philadelphia on their way south toward Washington, D.C. ... The visionary of the new, expanded reform movement is another professor, Larry Lessig of Harvard Law. He's written a book about political money, organized other grassroots groups, even tried running for president on the issue last year. At the march, Lessig said the goal is not to undo Citizens United. "Citizens United was the best thing for the reform movement since Richard Nixon. What it did was rally people," he said. But big donors already had too much sway, he said: "The democracy was already dead. The Supreme Court might have shot the body, but the body was already cold."

Saturday morning was rainy and cold, as a few hundred activists gathered in front of Philadelphia’s historic Independence Hall, home of both the Declaration of Independence and United States Constitution. They were there to draw attention to ways in which our government has become less representative and democratic. ... As they prepared to step off, Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard professor, activist, march organizer and — briefly — presidential candidate, addressed the crowd. “When Madison puttered around in that building convincing people to sign onto a constitution,” Lessig said, “at the core of his ideal was a democracy that would be responsive to the people, with this ideal of equality.

A national coalition aiming to improve democracy by taking big money out of politics and expanding voting rights is kicking off a 10-day march to Washington with a rally outside the Liberty Bell on Saturday. Organizers of what is being called "Democracy Spring" said the nonviolent, family-friendly rally will begin at 10 a.m. with speeches and music. Scheduled speakers include Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard University law professor who briefly ran for president but dropped out of the Democratic primary race in December after the debate rules changed; actress Gaby Hoffmann, known for her roles in the TV series Girls and Transparent; and Kai Newkirk, campaign director of Democracy Spring.

No matter which candidate emerges victorious in November’s U.S. presidential election, little progress will be made on the major problems facing the nation because the way Congress operates is broken, a Harvard law professor said during his address Wednesday as part of The Forum series. Lawrence Lessig, a one-time Democratic candidate in the presidential race before he dropped out four months ago, told the audience at UW-Eau Claire’s Schofield Auditorium that big money unduly influences members of Congress, meaning politicians pay attention to those funding their campaigns at the expense of the wishes of the vast majority of Americans. “It doesn’t matter who is elected president until we find a way to fix the way campaigns are funded,” Lessig said during his presentation titled Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress — And a Plan to Stop It.

To force Apple to help the FBI unlock a San Bernardino shooter's iPhone, a federal magistrate-judge invoked the All Writs Act, which allows courts to make a company turn over a customer's data to law enforcement...Proving that code is protected speech isn't the biggest obstacle Apple faces. Core to Apple's argument against writing a new version of its operating system is that, by complying, it will make its customers less secure. But Apple would have to overcome years of precedent in the way that companies work with law enforcement. "I'm sympathetic, but I can't think of any authority that says that you can evade your obligations to comply with the police because you don't trust they'll keep the information secure enough," said Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law professor and constitutional law scholar. Lessig noted that the security issue makes Apple's case unique. "If a bank has vault and the police have a search warrant, then there's no doubt that the bank has to open the vault," Lessig said. "But when bank opens vault, there's no concern that it's making every other vault unsafe."

Harvard law professor and political activist Lawrence Lessig declared his unlikely candidacy for president, last summer, on a single-issue platform: campaign-finance reform. He was forced to drop out before the second Democratic debate and has since been overtaken by his better-known (and, to be sure, better-financed) competitors. But that doesn’t mean he is done agitating, especially since the American public has caught on with his anti–Citizens United v. F.E.C. message. Here he expresses his admiration for Donald Trump, frustration with Bernie Sanders, and speculation on the future of both parties.

The battle over replacing Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court reminds us yet again of how divided we are...But anger and cynicism is where most voters are stuck, uncertain of what needs to be done, and deeply skeptical that a solution even exists. A solution grounded in simple, constitutional, common-sense principles and actions exists, and a brilliant communicator who has spent most of a decade refining and promoting it also happens to be eminently qualified to serve on the Supreme Court. President Obama must nominate him. His name is Lawrence Lessig and he is an author, Harvard Law School professor, married father of three and tireless advocate for citizen equality...Another friend, professor Alex Whiting, said of Lessig’s work ethic: “There’s normal working hard, and then there’s the kind of working hard that he does, which is sustained and comprehensive and driven in a way that I have just never seen in somebody else.”

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's funeral on Saturday drew more than 3,300 judges, lawyers, political figures and others to celebrate the life and career of the court's most controversial conservative leader...Another former Scalia law clerk who attended the funeral was Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law School professor who briefly ran for president last year. When asked if Scalia would have voted for him if he had become the Democratic candidate, Lessig said with a smile that it was possible. "He was very loyal to his clerks."

The late justice Antonin Scalia boasted that his United States Constitution was definitively “dead.” But in a mixed-up political season, what if our founding document wants a new lease on life? And what if we brought it, as a flawed and fungible 200-year-old wonder, back into the conventional conversation again? ...With that in mind, we’ve convened a panel of our favorite lawyers: Lawrence Lessig, a former Scalia clerk and an advocate-turned-candidate against money in politics; Jedediah Purdy, of Duke, a philosopher of modernity and democracy along with a professor of law; and Katharine Young of Boston College, in the business of comparing the world’s constitutions with an eye toward improving them.

Over 2,000 people, including Hollywood star Mark Ruffalo, are signing up for Democracy Spring, a coalition of 90 groups that's planning an April sit-in at the Capitol. The group is demanding an end to big money in politics and wants reforms to better protect the right to vote and fair and free elections. ...In addition to Ruffalo, Harvard Law professor Larry Lessig, who briefly ran for the 2016 Democratic nomination, and Zephyr Teachout, a law professor who unsuccessfully challenged New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the 2014 Democratic primary, are also signing on. Both Teachout and Lessig made campaign finance reform a centerpiece of their bids.

Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law School professor and liberal activist, and Antonin Scalia, the late conservative and originalist Supreme Court justice, would not be described as political allies. But Lessig had nothing but praise for Scalia, who died Saturday at the age of 79, when it came to the man’s principles in a USA Today op-ed Wednesday. ... “Whether perfectly or not, what was most striking to me was to watch someone of great power constrain his power, not for favors or public approval, but because he thought it right,” Lessig wrote, crediting Scalia’s “acts of integrity” for some of his own development as a lawyer.

An op-ed by Lawrence Lessig:  Justice Antonin Scalia was an “originalist” committed to interpreting  the Constitution in the way it would have been understood at the time it was adopted. He was also a conservative who was, as any of us are regardless of our politics, committed to particular outcomes that he hoped the law would support. Sometimes that originalism would conflict with conservatism. As a clerk for Scalia in the early 1990s, and the only liberal clerk in the chamber, I watched him struggle with that conflict. In every case that I knew in my time as a clerk, however reluctantly, in the end Scalia followed originalism, whether the result was conservative or not.

Another hallmark was the annual hiring of a liberal clerk, several of whom spoke to the Guardian about their personal fondness for Scalia despite glaring ideological differences.“You read his opinions and especially his dissents, and you’d think he’d be the Ted Cruz of the supreme court, completely acerbic. Yet he was loved by his colleagues,” Scalia’s former clerk and noted Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig told the Guardian. “I asked him about it once, and he said: ‘Because I’m consistently so outspoken and extreme in my writing, no one is offended. If Justice [Lewis] Powell didn’t smile at you one day, you’d think he was furious at you.’”

An op-ed by Larry Lessig: Bernie Sanders has made great strides casting doubt on the credibility of Hillary Clinton as an agent of change. How can you take on Wall Street if you take quarter-million-dollar speaking fees from its leading banks? How can you be a credible reformer if you have been so dependent on money from the status quo? But Sanders has his own credibility problem. It’s called Congress. The Vermont senator’s agenda is a “fiction,” the Post editorial board declared, because there is zero chance it could get through the legislature, and not just because there are more Republicans than Democrats on Capitol Hill. Even when President Obama had a super-majority of Democrats in Congress, he couldn’t get climate change legislation passed or a public option included in Obamacare. The threat of the powerful energy and health-care industries pouring millions of dollars into campaigns against Democrats was enough to get the leader of the last great “revolution” in U.S. politics to stand down. Until we change the way that money matters on Capitol Hill, the more sober-minded — they call themselves “realists” — will just roll their eyes at the fantastical promises of America’s most authentic politician.

“We can either have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both,” Associate Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said decades ago during another period of pronounced inequality in America. Echoing the concern of the Harvard Law School (HLS) graduate, over the past 30 years myriad forces have battered the United States’ legendary reputation as the world’s “land of opportunity.” The 2008 global economic meltdown that eventually bailed out Wall Street financiers but left ordinary citizens to fend for themselves trained a spotlight on the unfairness of fiscal inequality. The issue gained traction during the Occupy Wall Street protest movement in 2011 and during the successful U.S. Senate campaign of former HLS Professor Elizabeth Warren in 2012...“Money has corrupted our political process,” said Lawrence Lessig, the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at HLS. In Congress, he said, “They focus too much on the tiny slice, 1 percent, who are funding elections. In the current election cycle [as of October], 158 families have given half the money to candidates. That’s a banana republic democracy; that’s not an American democracy.”...Though labor rights have been eroding for decades, Benjamin Sachs, the Kestnbaum Professor of Labor and Industry at HLS, still thinks that unions could provide an unusual way to help equalize political power nationally...To restore some balance, Sachs suggests “unbundling” unions’ political and economic activities, allowing them to serve as political organizing vehicles for low- and middle-income Americans, even those whom a union may not represent for collective bargaining purposes.