Lawrence Lessig

Perma.cc, a project that takes on the problem of “link rot” or broken or defunct links in scholarship, has won the prestigious Webby Award for best law site of 2015. Developed by the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, Perma.cc is a web archiving service that helps authors and publishers create permanent links to their online sources, which are preserved by participating libraries.

More than 20 years ago, a newly elected President Bill Clinton decided that overhauling the country’s loophole-ridden campaign fund-raising rules would be a top goal of his first year in office. Months later, faced with battles over health care and the deficit as well as opposition from lawmakers in his own party who had prospered under the old political-money regime, Mr. Clinton dropped the issue. ... Still, Lawrence Lessig, a political theorist at Harvard and founder of a super PAC that has tried — but so far mostly failed — to turn dismay over Citizens United into a winning political issue, said he welcomed Mrs. Clinton’s help. “There is no hypocrisy in saying you can run a campaign according to the rules of the road while also saying that you want to change the system,” he said. Mrs. Clinton’s signal in Iowa, Mr. Lessig said, “reflects the increasing awareness everyone has that unless we address this issue, we can’t address any other issues.”  

Four of the teams that took part in a hackathon at the MIT Media Lab last weekend will go on to present their practical solutions for reducing institutional corruption to a conference at Harvard Law School later this spring...Scholars, researchers, news reporters, and activists have contributed to the Safra Center’s five-year project under the direction of Lawrence Lessig, studying, mapping, and looking for solutions to the institutional corruption that takes place in all corners of the globe. The project will culminate with a two-day conference, “Ending Institutional Corruption,” at Harvard Law School in May. Judges initially planned to let top three teams present their proposals at the conference, but the ideas were so strong that the organizers decided to let all four teams give at least an abbreviated report.

Much of Bernie Sanders' career is centered around his disgust for money in politics. He hates the fact of it, hates its effects, and, naturally, he has deep disdain for the process of raising it. The bigger the number, the more contempt he has. “I don’t do these fundraisers for $100,000 apiece or $10,000,” the Vermont senator, a self-described independent socialist, spat in his heavy Brooklyn accent during a recent speech to the National Press Club...“Hillary’s weakness, to the extent that she has one, is the perception that she’s part of an old system of influence and that she is as close to the influence game as anybody,” Harvard law professor Larry Lessig said in an interview. Lessig just led a failed $10 million effort to elect campaign-finance reformers to Congress. “What Bernie’s saying is, ‘Don’t elect a person who’s part of the problem.’ It’s not impossible that the issue blows up during the primary and she’s on the wrong side of it. And it’s not completely stupid to imagine that she fails because of it.”

It isn’t easy to reform the campaign finance system. Ask Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard law professor who last year raised $11 million to elect candidates who favored restrictions on unlimited contributions and spending only to find he’d become the issue’s latest Don Quixote. But he’s back with a new plan, and other groups are trying new lines of attack, hoping to change the behavior of candidates and lawmakers through rewards and punishments.

To have any chance of success, social movements must multiply awareness. Change is impossible unless people believe that change is needed. That is why activists spend so much time and effort spreading the word. But for all that effort, awareness is actually the easy part. The difficulty lies in cultivating knowledge so it grows into passion – and eventually action. That is precisely the challenge for the New Hampshire Rebellion and other groups battling the corrupting influence of money in politics...Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard law professor behind the nonpartisan Mayday PAC, draws inspiration from the late Doris “Granny D” Haddock, who 15 years ago walked across the nation at age 90 seeking campaign finance reform. In January, Lessig led a walk from Dixville Notch to Concord, which culminated in hundreds converging on the State House – a guerrilla force for peaceful change.

With their “listening tours,” “town hall meetings” and “community dinners,” politicians make a grand show of seeking input from constituents. But when it comes to shaping public policy, “the average voter’s views do not matter,” Harvard Law Prof. Lawrence Lessig said Monday night at the Roger Williams University School of Law. Lessig — author of “Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress and a Plan to Stop It” — wasn’t offering a casual observation. He was summarizing what he called “the largest empirical study of actual policy decision by our government, maybe in the history of political science.” In 2014, Princeton’s Martin Giles and Northwestern’s Benjamin I. Page found that “when the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact on public policy.”

An op-ed by Lawrence Lessig: Imagine that when you plugged something into an electrical outlet, the outlet queried the device and demanded identification. Was it a Sony TV or Panasonic? Was it a Dell or an Apple? And then based on that identification, different levels of quality or reliability of electricity were served at different prices. No doubt such a regime would benefit utility companies. I've not yet met anyone who thinks it would benefit innovation. Thus, it would be something possibly good for network providers, but plainly bad for the market generally. As I've watched the amazing progress that proponents of "network neutrality" have made, I've been astonished both by their success, and by how long this debate has been going on. I first drew the analogy to the electrical grid in testimony before John McCain's subcommittee more than a dozen years ago. Mark Lemley and I tried to lay the issue out, as it applied to the then-raging battle over "open access," almost 15 years ago. ... Defenders of the status quo are now frantically filling the tubes with FUD about the FCC's decision. But as you work through this FUD, keep one basic fact clear. Relative to practically every other comparable nation, America's broadband sucks. Seriously, sucks. Even France beats us in cost and quality. And as the genius Yochai Benkler established in the monumental report by the Berkman Center commissioned by the FCC after Obama was elected, the single most important reason our broadband sucks is the sell-out regulatory strategy of the prior decade at least.

When facing public disinterest, the cold shoulder from the news media, legions of incumbent politicians, a series of unfavorable Supreme Court decisions and more than $6 billion in entrenched interests; walking 150 miles through northern New Hampshire in temperatures as low as negative 20 degrees is the least of your problems. None of which dissuaded the 400 members of the New Hampshire Rebellion. On January 21, on the fifth anniversary of the Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission Supreme Court decision, the New Hampshire Rebellion, led by Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, descended on Concord, New Hampshire, to protest the corrupting influence of money in politics.

There's cold, and then there's New-Hampshire-in-winter cold...These were the sub-zero conditions that roughly 500 reform-minded activists faced as they marched south from Dixville Notch, down the roads and highways of the frozen-over Granite State last month...But Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard law professor, policy thinker and internet-famous political activist, wants to change that. In 2013, he started NH Rebellion — a "cross-partisan movement," in his words — "to end the system of corruption in Washington." This January's bitter-cold 10-day walk across the state was the group's second. The final one will happen next year, on the eve of New Hampshire's all-important presidential primary. "We have to put this issue on the table because the politicians won't talk about it otherwise," Lessig told us after his third day of marching in the frigid north.

I’m delighted to report that Prof. Jennifer Rothman and I have just submitted an amicus brief supporting en banc review by the Ninth Circuit in Davis v. Electronic Arts (and thus calling on the Ninth Circuit to reconsider Keller v. Electronic Arts, on which Davis relies). The brief is on behalf of 27 intellectual property law and constitutional law professors: [including]...Lawrence Lessig (Harvard Law School)...As the Keller majority acknowledged, references to real people, whether in novels, plays, songs, books, or video games, are on equal footing under the First Amendment. When that opinion, and the panel decision in this case, held that fantasy football video games are constitutionally unprotected against right of publicity claims, a wide range of speech was put in danger.

When Crazy Larry took the microphone in front of the State House yesterday, he did something that momentarily proved his newly adopted moniker. He told a hundreds-strong crowd of activists for campaign finance reform that their stance toward Citizens United was ungrateful...And here their leader, Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard law professor, was telling them they’re ungrateful for the 2010 ruling whose name alone spurred raucous boos? “No, really, I think we’re being a little ungrateful,” Lessig said from under the three-cornered hat he’d inherited from a rebel called Crazy Steve. “Citizens United has been the best gift to our movement since Richard Nixon.” Lessig noted that movements to take on the system of corruption in Washington have historically stalled. In New Hampshire, he said, the people backed Sen. John McCain when he said in Bedford 16 years ago that he’d take on the system, and they backed their native Doris “Granny D” Haddock when she marched across the country for the campaign finance reform movement at the age of 90. But local focus on the issue didn’t translate to the rest of the country.

At the Supreme Court Wednesday, shouts of protest and the clatter of overturned chairs disrupted the usual calm and formality of the nation’s highest court. People yelled, “We are the 99 percent,” “Money is not speech” and “overturn Citizens United.” They were protesting the court’s 2010 decision on campaign finance, which was issued five years ago. According to critics, the decision uncorked a flood of campaign cash. The protest was short-lived, as guards hauled the demonstrators out of the courtroom. But concerns about the impact of Citizens United remain. Last year, Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law School professor, started a Super PAC to end all Super PACs. The idea was to raise millions of dollars — a lot of it through a Kickstarter campaign — to support about six candidates last November who were sympathetic to serious campaign finance reform.

...This is the second year of the N.H. Rebellion, with its 20 or so diehards who will walk for 10 days the whole route, while others join in for a portion. Each year it has begun in Dixville Notch, but this year there are three other routes from Portsmouth, Keene and Nashua, all converging on Concord on Jan. 21. They walk with Harvard professor and political activist Lawrence Lessig in memory of Aaron Swartz and Doris Haddock and to bring awareness and momentum to what they call the most pressing issue in American politics. As long as the most wealthy Americans can influence elections, all other activism suffers, they said.

As a co-founder of Creative Commons, law professor Lawrence Lessig helped transform intellectual property laws for the digital age. Now he's focusing on reforming campaign finance, which he calls "the moral question of our age." Last year, Lessig created his own crowd-funded super PAC and helped lead a 185-mile march through New Hampshire to raise awareness of big money in politics. We'll talk to him about his career and latest crusade.

The Obama administration's extraordinary decision to point fingers at North Korea over the hacking of Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc. could lead to a courtroom spectacle if charges are ultimately filed against someone without ties to the isolated country, such as a disgruntled employee or an unrelated hacker...."The temptation to engage in the kind of global politics surrounding this rogue nation is probably just too great to resist," Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig said.

Eminent political theorist Danielle S. Allen, M.A. ’98, Ph.D. ’01, has been appointed both to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) as a professor in the Government Department and to Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics as its director. The announcement was made jointly today (Dec. 18) by Harvard University Provost Alan M. Garber and Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Michael D. Smith. Allen succeeds Harvard Law School (HLS) Professor Lawrence Lessig as director. Lessig joined the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics in 2009 to direct a five-year “lab” focused on institutional corruption. The lab completes its work in 2015. ...“Allen is a perfect director to continue the focus of the center on issues of practical ethical concern,” said Lessig, the center’s current director. “I am incredibly happy that she will join the center to continue its work.”

President Barack Obama in 2008 pledged to blunt the power of big money interests in politics. Instead, he's overseeing the return of a gilded age with billionaires running their own parties out of high-rise offices and candidates spending more of their time mingling with them behind closed doors. ..."He did literally nothing in the whole of his administration to address either the way congressional elections are funded or how presidential elections are funded," said Larry Lessig, a Harvard Law professor whose super-PAC spent $10 million this year trying to elect candidates who support limiting the influence of money in campaigns. "He hasn't even floated an idea."

Rhana Bazzini believes that government should change the way elections are funded. She believes the corporate influence on politics is corrupt and the power of change should be with the people. That simple idea prompted the 81-year-old activist to walk 435 miles from Sarasota to the steps of the Old Capitol...Harvard constitutional law professor Lawrence Lessig flew into Tallahassee on Tuesday to be a part of the movement. "I've been keen to support movements that are trying to push for a change in the way we fund elections," Lessing said. "We have such an incredibly concentrated and centralized way of funding elections right now. A tiny fraction of the one percent are the relevant funders of congressional campaigns."

Congress is working on extending a number of expiring tax breaks. These temporary tax cuts are very important to business; some are for research and development, others let companies write off investments in equipment or facilities. Corporations really want to see them extended. But nothing’s free in Washington. “These temporary provisions become very efficient tools for members of Congress to raise money, ” says Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law School professor. He says that members of Congress want to keep these tax breaks temporary so they can tell corporate donors: Give us campaign contributions so we can stay in office and renew your tax breaks. This keeps lobbyists busy too, according to Lessig. “So everybody inside the beltway wins in this Christmas gift process, which we call the extension of these temporary provisions,” he says.