Lawrence Lessig

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.

...I spoke by phone last week with the political activist and Harvard Law School professor Larry Lessig, who earlier this year launched Mayday, a self-styled “crowd-funded SuperPAC to end all SuperPACs…including this one,” to agitate for campaign-finance reform (although he considers that phrase a euphemism comparable to “liquid-intake problem” for alcoholism). Mayday has raised over $10 million to date, but saw only mixed results in the races that it invested in. Lessig's sure the public can be rallied, but admits that it's a long road. “I’m in the camp of people who think it’s not quite fair to criticize” people who wonder what reason there is to vote. He said, “I think it’s pretty reasonable for people not to engage in a system like this.”

In this turbulent midterm election year, two academics decided to practice what they preached. They left the classroom, confronted the reality of down-and-dirty politics, and tried to replace moneyed interests with the public interest. Neither was successful -- this year, at least -- but on this week's show, Bill talks with them about their experiences and the hard-fought lessons learned about the state of American democracy. Lawrence Lessig, who teaches law at Harvard, is a well-known Internet activist and campaign finance reform advocate. This election cycle, he started a crowd-funded SuperPAC aimed at reducing the influence of money in politics. Lessig tells Bill: "Our democracy is flat lined. Because when you can show clearly there's no relationship between what the average voter cares about, only if it happens to coincide with what the economic elite care about, you've shown that we don't have a democracy anymore."

Nearly every effort by Mayday PAC to elect a candidate who favored campaign finance reform in a contested race fell flat on Tuesday. The super PAC to end all super PACs, established in May 2014, was highly successful in raising money but much less so in targeting races it could win. The group reported making $7.5 million in independent expenditures across eight races this year. It won just two. “It was a tough night across the board for supporters of reform, but we’re glad we engaged in this fight," said Mayday's founder, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, in a statement. "The fight to root out corruption in our politics is one of the most important in our time and we will continue to pursue it with fierce urgency,” he vowed.

A letter by Lawrence Lessig and Nick Dranias. In a recent PostEverything commentary, Robert Greenstein attacked the Article V convention mode of proposing amendments to the U.S. Constitution. A critique of past balanced budget amendment proposals provided the platform for his assault. His argument is obsolete. The amendment by convention movement is not characterized by a left-right divide. The drive for the proposal of a balanced budget amendment is only one important part of a growing movement. The Article V amendment process is simply a vehicle for reform that Congress itself can’t control -- one that can spark fundamental changes in federal policy, and that can be tuned in advance to specific reform proposals. It is a procedure, not a party platform, open to reformers from all sides.

Fareed speaks with Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Harvard Law School and director of its Safra Center for Ethics, about what the U.S. Should learn from the Hong Kong protests..."in America, like in Hong Kong, we have a two-stage process. And at the first stage, a tiny fraction of our democracy chooses the candidates who get to run, effectively, in the second stage. And so it's just like that two-stage process in Hong Kong."

The new documentary “Citizenfour” centers on a series of candid interviews with Edward Snowden, the former Central Intelligence Agency employee and National Security Agency (NSA) contractor who last year leaked more than 200,000 classified documents about sweeping U.S. surveillance efforts. The film’s action unfolds in a Hong Kong hotel room over eight days, during which Snowden’s revelations about the vast scope of the surveillance programs hit the press. On Monday afternoon, via videoconference, Harvard Law School’s Lawrence Lessig engaged Snowden in another frank conversation.

At Harvard Law School’s Ames Courtroom on Monday, October 20, Furman professor of law and leadership Lawrence Lessig interviewed Edward Snowden in Russia via video conference. Using a question-and-answer format, the professor raised issues of institutional corruption and the role of whistle-blowers with the former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor who revealed last year that the agency routinely conducts mass surveillance of American citizens. Snowden now lives in Russia as he seeks asylum in the European Union.

Monday afternoon inside the Ames Courtroom at Harvard Law School, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig interviewed the American intelligence contractor and NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden via satellite, or, more specifically, via Google Hangout. Snowden, called a traitor by a number of senior government officials, leaked secret NSA documents about its global surveillance program to journalists from the U.S. version of British media outlet The Guardian and The Washington Post. He is in Russia evading charges of theft of government property and for violating the Espionage Act. The discussion, dubbed “Institutional corruption and the NSA,” covered many topics related to politics and policy, privacy, and the public’s right to knowledge deemed secret by government agencies.

...The difference between Goodell and the rest, though, is that he runs a nonprofit. That’s right—the National Football League is, in the eyes of the Internal Revenue Service, a nonprofit...“We are subsidizing this institution that has been so incredibly obtuse about the issues of sexual violence,” says Lawrence Lessig, the director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University and the founder of Rootstrikers, a grassroots advocacy group that has campaigned against the exemption. “The American public obviously likes sports and football, but when you’re in a clearly commercial context, when an enormous amount of money is being made, the idea that you would be subsidizing it is craziness.”

Last spring, Lawrence Lessig, a fifty-three-year-old Harvard legal theorist who opposes the influence of money in politics, launched a counterintuitive experiment: the Mayday PAC, a political-action committee that would spend millions of dollars in an attempt to elect congressional candidates who are intent on passing campaign-finance reform—and to defeat those who are not. It was a super PAC designed to drive its own species into extinction. Lessig adopted the motto “Embrace the irony.”

An op-ed by Lawrence Lessig. This week, tens of thousands of Hong Kong residents turned out to protest China's plan for bringing democracy to that city. Rather than letting voters pick the candidates that get to run for chief executive, Beijing wants the candidates selected by a 1,200 person "nominating committee." Critics charge the committee will be "dominated by a pro-Beijing business and political elite."...But there's not much particularly Chinese in the Hong Kong design, unless Boss Tweed was an ancient Chinese prophet. Tweed famously quipped, "I don't care who does the electing, so long as I get to do the nominating." Beijing's proposal is just Tweedism updated: a multi-stage election, with a biased filter at the first stage. The pattern has been common in America's democracy too.

Mayday, a political action committee launched by Law School professor Lawrence Lessig, has raised over $6 million since the spring, according to Federal Election Commission filings from August, and the PAC claims on its website that it has raised nearly $2 million more since then...Although it was born on Harvard’s campus, Mayday has generated most of its buzz and donations online, said Andrew Sellars, a fellow at the Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic who contributed to the PAC. “The conversation seems to be happening a lot in the internet policy space, where Lessig has been a prominent figure for so long,” Sellars said.

Being home to the nation’s first presidential primary does more than just fill our TV screens with lots of political commercials, according to Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig: It gives us a lot of heft to change the way politics is paid for. “You in particular have the power. ... You might not be enough, but you are necessary. We will not get to victory unless victory starts here,” Lessig told about 90 people who showed up at the Amato Center Wednesday to hear him discuss campaign finance reform.

Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig just learned a lesson: It takes more than some money to win an election. It takes a lot of money. Earlier this year, Lessig announced the creation of MayDay, a super PAC that would take advantage of newly loosened campaign finance laws to spend lots of money supporting candidates who commit to tightening those same campaign finance laws. The big bet was New Hampshire, where MayDay spent $1.6 million supporting long-shot candidate Jim Rubens in the state’s Republican Senate primary. That’s nearly six times the $270,000 that Rubens’s own campaign spent through Sept. 10 and more than any other outside group spent on the race, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. But it was far less than Scott Brown, a former U.S. senator, had at his disposal, and only a fraction of the total that a coalition of other outside groups poured into the race, including Americans for Prosperity, the conservative group backed by the billionaire Koch brothers, and the liberal Senate Majority PAC.

In little New Hampshire’s big money U.S. Senate primary, Republican Jim Rubens should be an afterthought at best. This former New Hampshire state senator, after all, hasn’t occupied elected office since the late 1990s. He then lost a bid for governor, and failed to win back his old state Senate seat in 2000. But when a quixotic, out-of-state super PAC with a million-plus dollars to burn suddenly backs you, the atmospherics change...“This is exactly why we’re in there—to effect change and change how he’s doing,” said Larry Lessig, the Harvard Law School professor who founded Mayday PAC: “We’re optimistic we’re going to be effective.”

The campaign for New Hampshire Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown threatened to sue Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig Sunday over a mailer calling Brown a “former Washington lobbyist.” Lessig’s Super PAC to end Super PACs, Mayday PAC, wrote the mailer in support of one of Brown’s Republican rivals, former state Sen. Jim Rubens, and to decry special interests’ influence in Washington...Lessig responded to the letter quoting the words of Clint Eastwood’s character “Dirty Harry” Callahan — “Go ahead; Make my day” — and offered to openly debate whether Brown was a “lobbyist.” Lessig also asked Brown if it was better to call Brown a former Massachusetts senator “who sold his influence to a DC lobbying firm.”