Lawrence Lessig

...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.”

When Lawrence Lessig ended his issue-oriented quest for the Democratic Party’s nomination in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, he vowed to continue his campaign to reform election finance practices and reduce the influence of money in politics. “The fight is not over,” said Lessig, the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School, during a conversation with his colleague Jonathan Zittrain about the lessons learned while campaigning for election finance reform...“Money has corrupted our political process,” said Lessig. “They [in Congress] focus too much on the tiny slice, 1 percent, who are funding elections. In the current election cycle, 158 families have given half the money to candidates. That’s a banana republic democracy, that’s not an American democracy.”

A book excerpt by Lawrence Lessig. Tweedism corrupts representative democracy. Not in a criminal sense, but in a design sense. Tweedism defeats the design weakens the dependency a representative democracy is meant to create. That systemic defeat is “corruption.” This is a particular way to understand the idea of “corruption,” as a way to understand the corruption of Congress. When we ordinarily use the term, “corrupt” is something we say of a person. And when we say it of a person, we of a representative democracy, by introducing an influence that mean something quite nasty. A corrupt person is an evil person, for corruption is a crime. There’s no ambiguity or uncertainty in the term. Like the death penalty or pregnancy, “corrupt” in this sense is binary.

The arrival in mid-2007 of what we now regard as the smartphone was that rarest of moments in technology, a true, full-on revolution. The center of that revolution was the upper end of the U.S. consumer market. Now, it’s bringing billions of people in the developing world online for the first time, creating some startling challenges and opportunities, a few of which surfaced Monday at Quartz’s Next Billion forum. Here are some highlights....Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig, who unsuccessfully sought the Democratic presidential nomination with a campaign based on Congressional reform, reminded the audience that he was branded a “Cassandra” 15 years ago for warning that the Internet could lead to a world in which everyone’s moves were tracked and privacy was compromised. “I am sorry that Cassandra was right about the Internet. But I am hear to tell you today that Cassandra is back,” he said. Paraphrasing Aaron Swartz he said, “The Internet is the best influence and the worst. It is both.”

After the GOP debate, a look at the power and limitations of money and super PACs in presidential politics this season...Guests...Lawrence Lessig, Roy L. Furman professor of law and leadership at the Harvard Law School and former Democratic candidate for President.

Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard law professor, jumped into the race for the Democratic presidential nomination in September, running on a platform focused on getting big money out of politics. Since he declared his candidacy, though, Lessig struggled to get attention from the media and voters, and ultimately couldn't get an invitation to the Democratic debates. By last week, he had decided to end his short-lived campaign. "Of course, from the beginning, we recognized that this improbable campaign depended on being able to get into the debates," Lessig tells NPR's Michel Martin...In an interview with Martin, he explains the philosophy that motivated his presidential bid — and what he hopes to see from other candidates now that it's finished.

Harvard law professor Larry Lessig said Monday he is ending his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. Lessig blamed the demise of his nearly three-month campaign on the Democratic Party, which he says leaves him ‘‘just shut out’’ of the primary debates. He struggled to hit 1 percent in national polls, the necessary marker to qualify for the primary matchups. ‘‘I may be known in tiny corners of the tubes of the Internet, but I am not well-known to the American public generally,’’ he said in an online video released Monday.

He is a luminary in the world of cyberlaw, a star Harvard professor with a résumé a hundred pages thick, and a sensation on the thought leader circuit. But even though he has raised more than $1 million for his presidential bid, Lawrence Lessig, who is mounting a quixotic campaign for the Democratic nomination, is struggling to get noticed...“Larry’s a terrific guy, but I don’t think that because you have a very important project, that therefore you should be in charge of all the millions of things the president is in charge of, including foreign policy,” said Charles Fried, a conservative Harvard Law School professor who gave Mr. Lessig $100 anyway. Alex Whiting, a Harvard Law professor who was best man at Mr. Lessig’s wedding, was surprised last summer when they sat on a boat in New Hampshire and his old friend revealed his plans to run for president. While highly intelligent, he said, Mr. Lessig does not have the chatty demeanor of a regular politician, and Mr. Whiting said he worried about the toll the campaign could take. “I think it’s been frustrating for him,” Mr. Whiting said. “He’s brilliant and offers new ways of thinking about familiar problems, but ideas don’t always carry the day.”

The U.S. Supreme Court announced Monday a series of policy changes that respond to public complaints about secret changes to the justices’ decisions, hiring "line-standers" for high-profile oral arguments and "link rot" in the court’s rulings...The move appears to be a direct response to a 2014 Harvard Law review article on the "nonfinality" of court opinions. In the article, Harvard Law School professor Richard Lazarus revealed that changes, some of them substantial, were being made to already issued opinions without notice to the public. Lazarus is a longtime friend of Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. Lazarus on Monday called the new policy “certainly a very welcome step by the justices to correct a practice that had persisted for far too long...But Lazarus cautioned that the court's new policy "stops short of making transparent the changes made between the slip opinion and the final bound volume of the U.S. Reports. To address that problem, the court needs to make publicly available the changed pages that are used in publishing the final bound version of the court’s opinions."...The court also announced new procedures to confront "link rot," the phenomenon where web-based links that are included in court opinions disappear or become broken, making it difficult for scholars and others to recover materials that were pertinent to court decisions. A 2013 study by Harvard scholars including presidential candidate Lawrence Lessig found that 50 percent of links in Supreme Court opinions do not link to the originally cited information.

Do Washington's net neutrality rules run roughshod over the First Amendment? That's what some opponents have been arguing -- claiming that the government's regulations infringe on Internet providers' right to free expression. Now, in a flurry of responses to that charge, defenders of the rules appear eager for the biggest showdown over the meaning of corporate speech since the Citizens United case...Others are challenging the idea that Internet providers are even capable of speech. As pipes that carry consumers' Web traffic to and fro, Internet providers are just a "conduit" for people's speech, according to a group of academics including Harvard's Lawrence Lessig and Yochai Benkler, and Stanford's Barbara van Schewick. "It follows that when the Open Internet Rules require providers to carry others’ speech, they do not require the providers themselves to speak," they argue in their own brief.

Long ago, Larry Lessig relished the private world of an academic. That was another life, though, before a cartoon version of his face—grey hair, tiny round glasses—cropped up all over the internet, before he discussed his books and joked around on TV shows like "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart." That was before he decided to run for President of the United States...“It was almost like he was another professor in the classroom,” remembers Alex Whiting, now a professor of the practice at Harvard Law School who attended Yale with Lessig. “You had the professor in the front of the classroom, the professor in the back,” he adds, cracking a grin...“He is, in many ways, an elegant man,” says Charles R. Nesson, a Law School professor who helped recruit Lessig for the Berkman Center for Internet and Society during his first stint at Harvard. “Elegant in the forcefulness of his ideas and mode of his presentation.”

Kim Dotcom and three colleagues face an extradition hearing that began Monday in an Auckland courtroom. Dotcom is the colorful German-born entrepreneur who started the Internet site Megaupload, which was shut down by federal authorities in 2012...In an affidavit for the defense, Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig argues that criminal copyright infringement applies only to people who directly download or steal something and not to secondary parties like website operators. The defense also plans to argue the hearing should be delayed.

One of the world's leading experts on copyright has reviewed the Kim Dotcom case and says there is no basis for extradition. Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig has weighed into the Megaupload prosecution with a legal opinion which condemns the prosecution case against the filesharing website. In an opinion released by Dotcom's lawyers, Professor Lessig said the allegations and evidence made public by the US Department of Justice "do not meet the requirements necessary to support a prima facie case that would be recognised by United States federal law."

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Larry Lessig, the law professor now running for president, seems to be trying to produce a real-life Frank Capra movie. He hopes to tap into a deep strain in American culture -- the one that defined Capra's work...Capra's best movies focus on the power of goodness and purity. His central opposition is between greed and corruption on the one hand and simple human decency on the other.