Lawrence Lessig

...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.”

Mick Mulvaney, acting head of the consumer finance watchdog, told a room full of bankers that the only lobbyists he met with as a congressman were those who made political donations to his office, and he urged them to continue lobbying lawmakers to weaken the regulator he runs..."Mulvaney’s attitude is a thousand times worse for America than even Donald Trump," said Lawrence Lessig, founder of Equal Citizens, a campaign for democratic reform. "It is the perfect picture of all that is wrong with D.C.—and that will remain wrong with D.C., even after this administration is gone."

Ethics experts say Mick Mulvaney, the White House budget director and interim head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, should be investigated for potentially violating federal bribery laws after he admitted that, as a congressman, he only gave meetings to lobbyists who donated to his campaign...Many argue that regardless of whether Mulvaney engaged in any illegal conduct, his Tuesday admission is a fireable offense, and excusing it perpetuates a culture of impunity in Washington. "It is the perfect picture of all that is wrong with DC — and that will remain wrong with DC, even after this administration is gone," Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard professor and former Democratic presidential candidate, told Business Insider in a statement.

A federal judge in Colorado on Tuesday dismissed a case its plaintiffs hope will eventually bring more clarity to how members of the Electoral College should vote in presidential elections. And a dismissal is actually just what the plaintiffs wanted. They expect an appeal could bring their case before the nation’s highest court...The case will certainly be appealed, said Lawrence Lessig, a well-known national elections attorney based in Massachusetts who represents Colorado’s electoral college members...“Imagine if the state said every elector had to vote for a Democrat,” Lessig told The Colorado Independent. “Being an elector is to have the power to make a choice.” Williams says he was following state law, and also followed instructions from a state judge throughout the process when he told electors to vote for Clinton.

As regional gerrymandering challenges draw an increasingly national focus, impeachment threats inspired by one such case drew condemnation from experts in constitutional law and judicial ethics. “In Putin’s Russia, this is completely normal,” Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig said in a phone interview. Nearly 5,000 miles west of Russia, the impeachment resolutions at issue were introduced Thursday in Pennsylvania by state Representative Cris Dush, who serves the 66th District of Indiana and Jefferson Counties.

Federal lawsuits filed simultaneously in Texas and three other states are seeking to end the system that awards every electoral vote to the winning presidential candidate in each state. The lawsuits argue that the winner-take-all system violates voting rights by discarding ballots cast in support of losing candidates in the four states, particularly Democrats in the GOP strongholds of Texas and South Carolina, and Republicans in Democratic California and Massachusetts...It’s not just Lone Star Democrats — “everyone in Texas is being ignored, because Texas just doesn’t matter to the presidential election,” said Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard University law professor who was a leading organizer of the legal effort.

An interview with Lawrence Lessig. Harvard law professor and political activist Lawrence Lessig briefly ran for president in 2015, but his campaign was more of an effort to spread a message than win a job. He called it “a referendum” on campaign finance reform and electoral reform. More than two years later, Lessig is still working on those big issues. But instead of using a presidential run as a vehicle for them, he’s going directly to the courts.

It's a fact that liberals crazy, and has become a preoccupation for President Donald Trump: Hillary Clinton, the Democrats' choice, crushed Trump at the ballot box, winning the popular vote by a margin of roughly 3 million, but Trump cruised to a win in the Electoral College, sweeping up 304 of 538 votes. It was the second time in recent history that the winning presidential candidate, a Republican, took office even though more people voted for the Democrat. It's also a system Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig believes is a Constitutional offense – and practically guarantees another popular-vote loser will again become commander-in-chief in the very near future. Every four years, the presidential election "focuses on 14 [swing] states, to the total exclusion of the rest of the country," says Lessig, who ran an under-the-radar campaign for president as an independent in 2016.

Civil rights activists are challenging the legality of four states’ winner-take-all method of allocating U.S. presidential electoral college votes, claiming the practice magnifies some votes at the expense of others and violates voters’ constitutional rights...“The promise of democracy is that all votes count equally,” Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard law professor, said about the suits. “Winner-take-all denies Americans that simple ideal. If you’re a Republican in California, or a Democrat in Texas, your vote for president gets counted only to be thrown away.” The idea for the challenges originated in a crowdfunding campaign organized by Lessig through the website EqualVotes.US.

An op-ed by Lawrence Lessig. Today, in four states across the country, lawsuits will be filed to challenge the way presidential electors are selected in America. The plaintiffs in these suits charge that the “winner-take-all” system—the system by which the candidate who wins the popular vote in a state gets all of the electoral college votes in that state—violates both the 14th Amendment’s principle of “one person, one vote,” and the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment.

A speech by Lawrence Lessig. None of us want to be here. I don’t mean literally. This is New Orleans, and I’m sharing a stage with Jennifer Lawrence, and my hero, Buddy Roemer, so don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty happy to be here. But none of us want to have to be here. None of us want to be living in a democracy where our first fight has got to be about that democracy. Because all of us believe that there are real things, important things, substantive things that this democracy must do. But can’t do now.

A national group is focusing on Alaska in a bid to get the U.S. Supreme Court to revisit a 2010 decision that upended how campaigns are run in this country. The court decision paved the way for corporations and unions to make unlimited independent expenditures, and in Alaska, was viewed by state officials as likely rendering several provisions of law prohibiting or limiting certain contributions unconstitutional...Lawrence Lessig, founder of Equal Citizens, said his group believes the commission has sided with “what is a kind of conventional view among lawyers” that his group believes is incorrect. “What we’re trying to seek is clarification that the limits can be enforced,” he said. Equal Citizens zeroed in on Alaska, in part, because the state has a procedure in place that allows citizens “to force the state to explain why it’s not enforcing its own law,” he said.

My guest for this episode of Fast Forward is Lawrence Lessig, a professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard University, where we recorded the show. In 1999, he wrote Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace; he has since updated that book and written many others. He's also the co-founder of Creative Commons and made a run for president in 2016, which he sadly did not win. He's also the creator of the Lessig Method of Presentation. I encourage you to Google it and look at the YouTube videos; it will change the way you give presentations. I know it changed the way I give mine.

Nearly a year after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, a Harvard University professor says 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton could still become commander in chief. Lawrence Lessig, the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School, penned an essay for Medium in October outlining a series of hypothetical scenarios that could take place should the ongoing probe find that the Trump campaign actually conspired with Russia to influence the results of the election...On Wednesday, Lessig told Newsweek this scenario was still a possibility. “This is one way it could happen,” Lessig said. “But that’s very different from saying I think it will happen, or should happen, or [that] the evidence is there for it to happen.”

An op-ed by Lawrence Lessig. Almost a year ago, a bunch of us began talking about how to fix an increasingly dangerous flaw in the mechanics of our Republic — the Electoral College. We had just witnessed the second in the last three Presidents get elected without winning the popular vote. It was quickly becoming apparent that this was not a once-in-a-century problem, but an increasingly likely part of our democratic future.

...The 2017 Republican House and Senate tax plans—currently being negotiated into a single package via reconciliation between the two chambers—are not 1986 reform. Likely no corporate lobbyist will be crying in a committee room if and when Donald Trump signs a finished bill. In part, that’s because both plans stuff new temporary business tax cuts into the code. For years to come, K Streeters will be selling their influence to get key politicians to renew them every few years. These temporary provisions—known as “tax extenders”—include an expiration date...Progressive author and Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig has called it “one of the most efficient machines for printing money for politicians that Washington has ever created.”

An op-ed by Lawrence Lessig. As I write these words, the FCC has just issued draft regulations abolishing the rules meant to secure “network neutrality” on the internet. Those regulations themselves were a surprising victory in the second term of the Obama administration. Obama had made neutrality a critical part of his first campaign. But it was a former industry lobbyist turned FCC chairman, Tom Wheeler, along with an extraordinary deputy, Gigi Sohn, who finally pressed a constitutionally resistant FCC to adopt a substantial body of federal regulations that would go a long way toward securing for the future of the internet the kind of competitive platform that defined the very best of its past.

An op-ed by Lawrence Lessig. American politics is strikingly bi-polar. We are firmly divided. We are firmly united. Yet the dynamic of the divided part makes the union part almost irrelevant. We are divided by party. Democrats are as far from Republicans as they have ever been in modern American history. We are loyal to our tribe; we punish the disloyal. The machines of our social life  —  Facebook and Twitter  —  feed us ideas we like, and discipline us for deviance from those ideas. If we signal improperly, “friends” may “unfriend” us. So we speak as we should. “Hey, like me! Because, like you, I hate them.” Thus the politics of hate wired to our emotions. Yet at the same time, we are as united as we have ever been. Overwhelmingly, whether Democrat or Republican, we are angry with our government. Overwhelmingly, we see our “representatives” as not representing us.

A national campaign to impeach President Donald Trump has drawn some high-powered talent from legal academia. Two organizations, Free Speech for People and RootsAction.org, have joined forces behind Impeach Donald Trump Now, a grassroots petition drive that has collected thus far more than 1.2 million signatures, and a lobbying effort on behalf of a congressional resolution calling for an impeachment investigation. The campaign is aided by a 13-member legal advisory board, including: Harvard Law School’s Laurence Tribe and Lawrence Lessig...

...The US Constitution is the most difficult to alter of any in the world. Article V lays out two ways to propose amendments: with the support of two-thirds of both houses of Congress, or by a convention of states called by Congress upon the request of two-thirds of the states...Perhaps the most prominent opponent of Citizens United has been the Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, who ran a long-shot campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016. Given the impossibility of getting a “representational integrity” amendment passed in Congress, as well as the apparently successful conspiracy to keep the judicial branch in Republican hands for the foreseeable future, Lessig’s only hope rests with a convention of states. In a recent phone call, Lessig observed that the movement behind the Phoenix convention is strictly partisan and therefore likely to fail.