Lawrence Lessig

Lester Lawrence Lessig III (born June 3, 1961) is an American legal scholar and political activist.

He is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the former director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University.

He is the founder of Creative Commons and Equal Citizens.

Lessig was born on June 3, 1961, in Rapid City, South Dakota.

Previously, he had held strong conservative or libertarian political views, desired a career in business, was a highly active member of Teenage Republicans, served as the youth governor for Pennsylvania through the YMCA Youth and Government program in 1978, and almost pursued a Republican political career.

What was intended to be a year abroad at Cambridge convinced him instead to stay another two years to complete an undergraduate degree in philosophy and develop his changed political values.

During this time, he also traveled in the Eastern Bloc, where he acquired a lifelong interest in Eastern European law and politics.

Lessig remains skeptical of government intervention but favors some regulation, calling himself "a constitutionalist."

On one occasion, Lessig also commended the John McCain campaign for discussing fair use rights in a letter to YouTube where it took issue with YouTube for indulging overreaching copyright claims leading to the removal of various campaign videos.

In computer science, "code" typically refers to the text of a computer program (the source code).

Lessig has been politically liberal since studying philosophy at Cambridge in the mid-1980s.

By the late 1980s, two influential conservative judges, Judge Richard Posner and Justice Antonin Scalia, selected him to serve as a law clerk, choosing him because they considered him brilliant rather than for his ideology and effectively making him the "token liberal" on their staffs.

Posner would later call him "the most distinguished law professor of his generation."

Lessig has emphasized in interviews that his philosophy experience at Cambridge radically changed his values and career path.

He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1983 with a double degree BA in economics and a BS in management.

He then studied philosophy at Trinity College, Cambridge, receiving an MA in 1986.

Lessig then returned to the United States to attend law school.

He did his first year at the University of Chicago Law School before transferring to Yale Law School, graduating in 1989 with a JD degree.

After graduating from law school, Lessig was a law clerk for Judge Richard Posner of the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit from 1989 to 1990, and then for Justice Antonin Scalia of the US Supreme Court from 1990 to 1991.

Lessig started his academic career at the University of Chicago Law School, where he was professor from 1991 to 1997.

As co-director of the Center for the Study of Constitutionalism in Eastern Europe there, he helped the newly independent Republic of Georgia draft a constitution.

From 1997 to 2000, he was at Harvard Law School, holding for a year the chair of Berkman Professor of Law, affiliated with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.

He subsequently joined Stanford Law School, where he established the school's Center for Internet and Society.

In 2001, he founded Creative Commons, a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon and to share legally.

Prior to his most recent appointment at Harvard, he was a professor of law at Stanford Law School, where he founded the Center for Internet and Society, and at the University of Chicago.

He is a former board member of the Free Software Foundation and Software Freedom Law Center; the Washington, DC lobbying groups Public Knowledge and Free Press; and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2007.

As a political activist, Lessig has called for state-based activism to promote substantive reform of government with a Second Constitutional Convention.

Lessig returned to Harvard in July 2009 as professor and director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.

In 2013, Lessig was appointed as the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership; his chair lecture was titled "Aaron's Laws: Law and Justice in a Digital Age."

Lessig is a proponent of reduced legal restrictions on copyright, trademark, and radio frequency spectrum, particularly in technology applications.

In May 2014, he launched a crowd-funded political action committee which he termed Mayday PAC with the purpose of electing candidates to Congress who would pass campaign finance reform.

Lessig is also the co-founder of Rootstrikers, and is on the boards of MapLight and Represent.Us.

He serves on the advisory boards of the Democracy Café and the Sunlight Foundation.

In August 2015, Lessig announced that he was exploring a possible candidacy for President of the United States, promising to run if his exploratory committee raised $1 million by Labor Day.

After accomplishing this, on September 6, 2015, Lessig announced that he was entering the race to become a candidate for the 2016 Democratic Party's presidential nomination.

Lessig described his candidacy as a referendum on campaign finance reform and electoral reform legislation.

He stated that, if elected, he would serve a full term as president with his proposed reforms as his legislative priorities.

He ended his campaign in November 2015, citing rule changes from the Democratic Party that precluded him from appearing in the televised debates.

Lessig was a candidate for the Democratic Party's nomination for president of the United States in the 2016 US presidential election but withdrew before the primaries.