Lawrence Lessig

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.

...Perhaps the loudest point that Democrats have made, especially Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, is about the way the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling allowed money from unknown sources to pour into elections. On the question of whether corporations and labor unions should be able to spend unlimited sums advocating for or against candidates and issues, many Republicans see it as a question of free speech protected by the First Amendment – as did the Supreme Court. But the court couldn’t have understood the current reality, in which money to be used influencing politics is funneled through nonprofits that aren’t required to disclose their donors, said Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard law professor and campaign finance reformer. “The Supreme Court didn’t even realize there was the dark money loophole. The court explicitly said all this stuff would be disclosed. That means it either was lying or it didn’t understand the way (501(c)4s) interacted with super PACs,” Lessig said.

Back on campus after a failed bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig said the campaign was a learning experience in the challenges affecting democracy in America. In particular, Lessig said restrictive changes to the Democratic National Committee’s debate eligibility requirements excluded him from the stage, limiting the visibility of his electoral reform platform. Lessig said he is now looking for the Republican Party to continue his proposed reforms and sees businessman Donald J. Trump as the candidate with the best chance of enacting the campaign finance reforms he ran on, given his strident criticism of Super PACs.

The latest chapter of Lawrence Lessig’s career ended in November, when the Harvard Law School professor concluded his bid for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. That effort centered on his campaign to reform Congressional politics. Prior to that, Prof. Lessig’s scholarship, teaching and activism focused on technology policy and the Internet. He has argued for greater sharing of creative content, the easing of restrictions in areas such as copyright, and the concept of Net Neutrality. Prof. Lessig, who founded the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, is the author of numerous books on technology, including “Code: and Other Laws of Cyberspace,” and “The Future of Ideas: the Fate of the Commons in a Connected World.” CIO Journal asked Prof. Lessig for his thoughts on how technology policy, which is at multiple critical junctures around the world, can and should evolve. Privacy, surveillance, and international governance of the Internet and telecommunications networks will approach milestones in 2016, with implications for business and beyond.

The Florida postal worker who landed a gyrocopter at the U.S. Capitol on April 15 to protest campaign finance laws is planning to run for Congress, his attorney said in a court filing Wednesday. Douglas Hughes, 62, of Ruskin, Fla., is asking a court for permission to travel to campaign on curbing the influence of money in politics, a job that would include meeting voters, making speeches and soliciting endorsements, his lawyer said. Hughes’s bid might also test whether felons can run for Congress in Florida...To support his bid to travel, Hughes’s attorney included a letter from Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, a respected constitutional scholar who last month ended his own quixotic bid for the Democratic nomination for president as a campaign finance reform advocate. In a letter to the judge dated Nov. 25, Lessig acknowledged that Florida’s constitution might be read to bar any person convicted of a felony to hold office. However, Lessig said, that provision also might be read to apply only to state offices, and, if not, would violate the Constitution, which alone sets requirements for congressional office. “It is my view that Florida law cannot be held to restrict the ability of Mr. Hughes to run for Congress from the state of Florida,” Lessig wrote. “That conclusion thus creates a substantial interest for him to be able to travel throughout Florida to pursue the work of his campaign.”

He may no longer be running for President, but he still has plenty to say about the American political system. Lawrence Lessig is a Harvard Law professor and author of “Republic Lost, The Corruption of Equality and the Steps to End It.” He is a former candidate for the 2016 democratic nomination and ran on a platform of eliminating the influence of money in politics.

Anne Scott entered St. George’s School as a 10th-grader in 1977, just a few years after the prestigious prep school first admitted girls at its campus in Middletown, R.I. She was a good student, and a three-sport athlete, from the suburbs of Wilmington, Del. But a month after she arrived, a field hockey injury brought her into the orbit of the school’s longtime athletic trainer. He molested and raped her, and threatened to come after her if she told anyone. For years, terrified and ashamed, she did not. Finally, in her mid-20s, her life a shambles of diagnoses and hospitalizations, she told her parents, who took her to see Eric MacLeish, an attorney who would later gain renown representing abuse victims of Catholic priests...Harvard Law professor Larry Lessig, who has known Scott since they were students at Penn, has signed on as co-counsel to MacLeish. Lessig, who was abused by the choir director as a student at the American Boychoir School in Princeton, N.J., said St. George’s needs to make therapy support “immediately available and not filtered through a lawyer.”