Lawrence Lessig

Among President Trump’s major accomplishments is the booming industry in books about him, his administration, the state of democracy in America, the rise of autocracy in America and abroad, the reasons for his rise, the bases of his support, the state of the Republican Party, the state of his mental health or lack thereof, the chaos in his White House and so on. Not all are strictly about Trump — the fact is the conditions and dynamics that brought us Trump long preceded him, and the changes in the fabric of our Republic are paralleled by changes in other longstanding democracies around the globe. Two of the nation’s top public intellectuals are adding to this expansive genre with short books designed for broad audiences. Neither is fundamentally about Trump; indeed, one barely mentions the president. But both are about the America that Trump’s ascent now typifies...“America, Compromised” is by Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard law professor, the former head of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics and an activist on campaign finance.

An op-ed by Lawrence Lessig. On Thursday, election officials in Maine declared Democrat Jared Golden to be the first member of Congress elected by “ranked-choice voting” (“RCV”). Maine’s idea should now be adopted by New Hampshire for its presidential primary, and by battleground states for the general election as well.

Samantha Bee has a new ice cream flavor, and she’s using it to teach her audience about constitutional originalism and campaign finance reform. On a special midterms election episode on Monday, the Full Frontal host dressed up in Colonial-era garb to talk to former FEC chair Ann Ravel and Harvard professor Larry Lessig about what the framers of the United States Constitution thought about money in politics. Both experts agreed that the founders who opposed Parliament’s dependence on the king would not approve of corporate lobbyists influencing members of Congress.

With nine days before the election, the New Hampshire Supreme Court's move to permit voter registration requirements to go forward unleashed a torrent of reactions from supporters and opponents of the controversial 2017 law....Lawrence Lessig is a Harvard Law School professor who founded Equal Citizens and led statewide marches through New Hampshire for campaign finance reform. "Instead of moving towards a 21st century democracy that promotes an equal freedom to vote, the New Hampshire Legislature and courts have chosen to make casting a ballot even harder," Lessig said. "We should be engaging voters, especially young voters, in the political process, not, as today's decision has done, stifle it."

Lawrence Lessig was once best-known as the special master in the Microsoft Antitrust Case, then he was best known as the co-founder of Creative Commons, then as a fire-breathing corruption fighter: in America, Compromised, a long essay (or short nonfiction book), Lessig proposes as lucid and devastating a theory of corruption as you'll ever find, a theory whose explanatory power makes today's terrifying news cycle make sense -- and a theory that demands action.

...Most advocates of election reform are similarly positive about ranked-choice voting. But they don’t agree on the best way forward. “I’m a big supporter of ranked-choice voting,” says Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Harvard Law School. “But I think one of the mistakes they’ve made is that they pursued it from the bottom up when a much better strategy is to do it from the top down.” In other words, start with the presidential race.

Donald Trump is back in the place he loves best: the campaign trail. The president is logging thousands of miles on Air Force One with the midterm elections approaching Nov. 6. He is fighting to prevent a Democratic takeover of Congress, which would derail much of his legislative agenda and open the door to multiple investigations of his presidency...Democrats say Trump and the Kavanaugh issue are also motivating anti-Trump voters. Many Democratic voters were frustrated to see Kavanaugh confirmed to the Supreme Court, despite allegations from Christine Blasey Ford that he sexually assaulted her when they were both in high school. Kavanaugh has vehemently denied the allegations. "I think it's more likely to be a plus for the Democrats," said Lawrence Lessig, professor at Harvard Law School, former Democratic presidential candidate, and founder of the organization EqualCitizens.US. "Their anger is more visceral."

Can a Supreme Court Justice be impeached if the judge lied during confirmation hearings?..."If he lied under oath, certainly. But the question is always political, as Gerald Ford said, the question is just what Congress believes is impeachable," Lawrence Lessig, a Professor at Harvard Law School, said.

On this edition of Your Call, we’ll talk with law professor Lawrence Lessig, who has spent much of his career trying to fix our broken political system. His new book, America, Compromised, is based on a series of lectures he has given about how US institutions no longer serve the purposes for which they were designed. They now serve the wealthy and corporations, which work to help the rich get richer. What's happening isn't illegal. It's systemic. He writes, "There is not a single American awake to the world who is comfortable with the way things are." What can we do to change the system?

Democrats are running like it’s 2006 again. That strategy may help them win races in November, but it isn’t risk-free. The revival of the minority party’s anti-lobbying, anti-big-donor messaging, known as the “culture of corruption” mantra from a dozen years ago, speaks to disheartened voters. It also allows Democrats to highlight the persistent ethical and legal troubles, including indictments and guilty verdicts, among those in the Trump orbit...Vilifying lobbyists amounts to “cheap talk,” says Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, author of “Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress — and a Plan to Stop It.”...Lessig, an advocate of using taxpayer dollars to finance elections, says that risk exists. But the measure of overhaul proposals, he says, should not be whether it’s easy to pass but whether it would have any effect. “Democrats have been trying to do reform on the cheap,” he said. “What really disappoints me is when you see these supposed leaders, even progressives, take the easy way out.”

Is the Electoral College broken? So argues Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig, a former presidential candidate and the founder of the non-profit group Equal Citizens. Lessig, along with people like former Mass. Governor Bill Weld, is leading a series of lawsuits to change it...Lessig joined Jim Braude to discuss his campaign.

A Harvard Law professor, former governor William F. Weld, and Al Gore’s onetime attorney are making a long-shot bid to change the Electoral College system, arguing that it encourages presidential candidates to devote all their time to a handful of swing states and ignore the vast majority of the country.The high-powered group is suing two blue states, Massachusetts and California, and two red states, Texas and South Carolina, arguing that the winner-take-all system that they and 44 other states use to allocate electors to the Electoral College effectively disenfranchises millions of voters who back the losing candidates...The lawsuits were orchestrated by Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law professor and longtime critic of the Electoral College, corporate money in politics, and gerrymandering, who briefly ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2015. He hopes to get the case to the Supreme Court before the 2020 presidential election.

The 2016 presidential election is over, but debate surrounding the fairness of the Electoral College rages on — with one major twist. You've probably never heard of Lawrence Lessig. The liberal political activist and Harvard law professor ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, but was unable to get his name on the ballot. Alongside voter rights advocates, Lessig is now suing one of the most liberal states in the country, arguing that California's winner-take-all system disenfranchises Republican voters.

An op-ed by Lawrence Lessig...The child separation policy crosses the line for me. I don’t know if it would have affected me as much as it has before I had kids. Before I had kids, a kid’s cry was a noise. Now it is a line into a soul. Every parent can hear the difference between crying and aching. No parent can listen to these cries and not feel his or her heart rend. The lies from this administration are so regular that we don’t even notice. And so it is with this policy too — which on its face is a lie since the same administration gives three different accounts (Trump: it’s the Democrat’s policy; Nielsen: “it isn’t a policy”; Sessions: it’s my policy and I’m proud of it!). Suffice it that with no change in the actual law there was a radical change in the actual practice — and what accounts for that change is a decision by the Trump administration to adopt yet another brain-dead policy. Senator Warren puts its best: we have a president who is holding “kids hostage to try and get Congress to pay for his stupid wall.”

The U.S. Supreme Court punted Monday on its biggest decision of its term so far. The justices had been expected to rule on the limits of partisan gerrymandering. Instead, the court sidestepped the major issues on technical grounds, sending the issue back to the lower courts for further examination...In an unusual step, the justices, by a 7-to-2 vote, sent the case back to the lower courts, in order to give the Democratic voters a chance to present evidence of injury on a district-by-district basis, instead of a statewide basis. The Maryland case, likewise, was remanded to the lower courts...But Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Harvard Law School, was more optimistic for the challengers, seeing Monday's decision as "a short-term stumble on the way to a long-term victory." In the long run, he said, "we're going to see this as really the dam breaking and an extraordinary opportunity to clean up the unfairness of our political system."

An op-ed by Lawrence Lessig. Almost exactly 20 years ago, Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which extended the term of existing copyrights by 20 years. The Act was the 11th extension in the prior 40 years, timed perfectly to assure that certain famous works, including Mickey Mouse, would not pass into the public domain...Twenty years later, the fight for term extension has begun anew. Buried in an otherwise harmless act, passed by the House and now being considered in the Senate, this new bill purports to create a new digital performance right—basically the right to control copies of recordings on any digital platform (ever hear of the internet?)—for musical recordings made before 1972.

...In response to Kennedy’s narrow conception of corruption, Harvard Law professor and onetime presidential contender Lawrence Lessig has advocated for a broader idea of corruption. In his book Republic, Lost, Lessig spells out his notion of “dependence corruption,” whereby Congress is unduly responsive to big donors because they are dependent on them for campaign money. He takes pains to argue on “originalist” grounds, hoping to appeal to the conservative majority of the Court, who attempt to cleave closely to the meaning of words as they are found in documents at the time of the Constitution’s drafting. Alas, his arguments have largely fallen on deaf judicial ears.

An op-ed by Lawrence Lessig. Mick Mulvaney, the White House budget director and acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, told lobbyists last week what they already knew: Legislators are dependent upon their funders, and their funders are not the people. Speaking to 1,300 attendees of the American Bankers Association conference, Mulvaney reported that as a congressman, he never spoke to lobbyists who hadn’t given him money, sometimes spoke to lobbyists who had, but always spoke to constituents who “came from back home and sat in my lobby.”