Lawrence Lessig

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.

First, he started a crowd-sourced campaign to elect members of Congress willing to change the way campaigns are financed. Now, he’s decided to run for office himself, but not just any old office – the presidency. Harvard Law School professor, author, and activist Lawrence Lessig, who now can add Democratic presidential candidate to his resume, is crowd-sourcing his campaign. If it seems familiar, it’s because it is. Lessig adopted a similar formula when he helped start Mayday PAC, billed as the super PAC to end all super PACs.

Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig met his self-imposed goal of crowd-funding $1 million by Labor Day, and Sunday on ABC announced he's running for the Democratic nomination for President. Lessig, an activist with a grassroots following among some progressives, says he's running on a singular platform — the Citizen Equality Act of 2017. It would expand voting access, ban gerrymandering and institute campaign finance reform. "I think I'm running to get people to acknowledge the elephant in the room," Lessig said Sunday on ABC. "This stalemate, partisan platform of American politics in Washington right now doesn't work. And we have to find a way to elevate the debate to focus on the changes that would actually get us a government that could work again, that is not captured by the tiniest fraction of the one percent who fund campaigns."

(Subscription required) Silicon Valley icon Lawrence Lessig knows his moonshot bid for the White House hinges on the innovation and support of the tech industry. Mr. Lessig, a 54-year-old Harvard professor who helped build cyber law, is exploring a run as a Democratic presidential candidate on a narrow platform: overhauling campaign finance law. To do that, he is relying on the Internet. He is crowdsourcing donations and polling his site’s visitors to choose his running mate. He said he is the first candidate to make his campaign entirely open source, in the hopes of collecting more data about potential donors and voters. “We don’t have the advantage of a candidate who has been on the field for the last four years, we don’t have the advantage of a reality TV candidate who is worth $10 billion,” Mr. Lessig said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “So one place we might get an advantage is with innovation for software that runs and drives the campaign.”

An op-ed by Lawrence Lessig. Earlier this week I launched a committee to explore the possibility of running in the Democratic Primary to be a very different kind of president. As I explained then, the run would be a referendum around a very simple idea: that if, as Elizabeth Warren puts it, “the system is rigged,” then we need a plan to fix that rigged system. My plan is a referendum. My candidacy would be a referendum. Elected with a single mandate to end this corrupted system, I would serve only as long as it takes to pass fundamental reform. I would then resign, and the vice president would become president. The most common (polite) reaction to this obviously implausible idea was two words: Bernie Sanders.

Lawrence Lessig wants to be president—for a day. The Harvard law professor, who says his top priority is to “unrig this rigged system,” is launching an unconventional bid to be what he calls a “referendum president.” His idea is straightforward: If elected, Mr. Lessig would take action to overhaul campaign-finance laws and end what he describes as voter suppression and partisan gerrymandering. Then — perhaps even after a single day, though he acknowledges that’s “hopeful”—he would step aside and let his vice president lead. He says he would consider Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders or Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren—who has repeatedly said she does not plan to run—to join him on the ticket.

A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts. If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS, an outcome that drew criticism from some lawmakers who wanted a more extensive crackdown. From that point on, UBS’s engagement with the Clinton family’s charitable organization increased...The flood of donations and speech income that followed exemplifies why the charity and its fundraising have been a running problem for the presidential campaign of Mrs. Clinton, the Democratic front-runner. Republicans as well as some Democrats have raised questions about potential conflicts of interest. “They’ve engaged in behavior to make people wonder: What was this about?” says Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig, who is a Democrat. “Was there something other than deciding the merits of these cases?”