62 Facts About Lawrence Lessig

Lester Lawrence "Larry" Lessig III was born on June 3,1961 and is an American legal scholar and political activist.

Lawrence Lessig 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.

Lawrence Lessig is the founder of Creative Commons and of Equal Citizens.

Lessig was born on June 3,1961, in Rapid City, South Dakota to Lester Lawrence "Jack" Lessig II who was an engineer and Patricia "Pat" West Lessig, a real estate agent.

Lawrence Lessig has two older step-siblings, Robert and Kitty, and a younger biological sister, Leslie.

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

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

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

Lawrence Lessig did his first year at the University of Chicago Law School before transferring to Yale Law School, and graduated in 1989 with a JD degree.

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

Lawrence Lessig subsequently joined Stanford Law School, where he established the Stanford Center for Internet and Society.

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

Lawrence Lessig 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.

Lawrence Lessig was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2007.

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

Lawrence Lessig serves on the advisory boards of the Democracy Cafe and the Sunlight Foundation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

On one occasion, Lawrence Lessig 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 that led to the removal of various campaign videos.

Lawrence Lessig later updated his work in order to keep up with the prevailing views of the time and released the book as Code: Version 2.0 in December 2006.

Lawrence Lessig has been a proponent of the remix culture since the early 2000s.

Lawrence Lessig further articulates remix culture as intrinsic to technology and the Internet.

Lawrence Lessig has compared this to the failure of prohibition, both in its ineffectiveness and in its tendency to normalize criminal behavior.

On March 28,2004 Lawrence Lessig was elected to the FSF board of directors.

In March 2006, Lawrence Lessig joined the board of advisors of the Digital Universe project.

Lawrence Lessig has long been known to be a supporter of net neutrality.

However, Lawrence Lessig has supported the idea of allowing ISPs to give consumers the option of different tiers of service at different prices.

Lawrence Lessig was reported on CBC News as saying that he has always been in favour of allowing internet providers to charge differently for consumer access at different speeds.

Lawrence Lessig has called for limiting copyright terms for creative professionals to five years, but believes that since many of them are independent, the work of creative professionals would become more easily and quickly available if a bureaucratic procedure were introduced to renew trademarks for up to 75 years after this five-year term.

Lawrence Lessig has repeatedly taken a stance that privatization through legislation such as that seen in the 1980s in the UK with British Telecommunications is not the best way to help the Internet grow.

From 1999 to 2002, Lawrence Lessig represented a high-profile challenge to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.

In March 2003, Lawrence Lessig acknowledged severe disappointment with his Supreme Court defeat in the Eldred copyright-extension case, where he unsuccessfully tried to convince Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who had sympathies for de-regulation, to back his "market-based" approach to intellectual property regulation.

Lawrence Lessig sought damages under section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which holds parties liable for misrepresentations of infringement or removal of material.

Lawrence Lessig was represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Jones Day.

Lawrence Lessig came out in favor of a "right to warn" proposed by former OpenAI employees that would protect their right to warn the public of the catastrophic risks of AI.

Lawrence Lessig agreed to work pro bono in defense of the whistleblowers.

At the iCommons iSummit 07, Lawrence Lessig announced that he would stop focusing his attention on copyright and related matters in order to work on political corruption instead, as the result of a transformative conversation with Aaron Swartz, a young internet prodigy whom Lawrence Lessig met through his work with Creative Commons.

Lawrence Lessig criticized the revolving-door phenomenon in which legislators and staffers leave office to become lobbyists and after having become beholden to special interests.

In February 2008, a Facebook group formed by law professor John Palfrey encouraged Lawrence Lessig to run for Congress from California's 12th congressional district, the seat vacated by the death of Representative Tom Lantos.

In November 2011, Lawrence Lessig announced that Rootstrikers would join forces with Dylan Ratigan's Get Money Out campaign, under the umbrella of the United Republic organization.

In 2010, Lawrence Lessig began to organize for a national Article V convention.

Lawrence Lessig has called for state governments to call for a national Article V convention, including by supporting Wolf-PAC, a national organization attempting to call an Article V convention to address the problem.

Lawrence Lessig announced the launch of his long shot presidential campaign on September 6,2015.

Lawrence Lessig pledged to seek the nomination if he raised one million dollars by Labor Day 2015.

Lawrence Lessig was interviewed in The New York Times and Bloomberg.

Lawrence Lessig's campaign was focused on a single issue: The Citizen Equality Act, a proposal that couples campaign finance reform with other laws aimed at curbing gerrymandering and ensuring voting access.

In October 2015, Lawrence Lessig abandoned his automatic resignation plan and adopted a full policy platform for the presidency, although he did retain the passage of the Citizen Equality Act as his primary legislative objective.

Lawrence Lessig announced the end of his campaign on November 2,2015.

In 2017, Lawrence Lessig announced a movement to challenge the winner-take-all Electoral College vote allocation in the various states, called Equal Votes.

In 2023, Lawrence Lessig wrote an editorial in Slate suggesting that the electoral college should be the body that decides whether Donald Trump engaged in insurrection under the US Constitution.

In 2002, Lawrence Lessig received the Award for the Advancement of Free Software from the Free Software Foundation.

Lawrence Lessig received the 2014 Webby Lifetime Achievement award for co-founding Creative Commons and defending net neutrality and the free and open software movement.

Lawrence Lessig reached a settlement with the school in the past, under confidential terms.

Lawrence Lessig revealed his experiences in the course of representing another student victim, John Hardwicke, in court.

Lawrence Lessig is married to Bettina Neuefeind, a German-born Harvard University colleague.

Lawrence Lessig's essay drew criticism, and about a week later, Nellie Bowles of The New York Times had an interview with Lawrence Lessig in which he reiterated his stance related to such donations broadly.

The article used the headline "A Harvard Professor Doubles Down: If You Take Epstein's Money, Do It in Secret", which Lawrence Lessig confirmed was based on a statement he had made to the Times.

In January 2020, Lawrence Lessig filed a defamation lawsuit against the Times, including writer Bowles, business editor Ellen Pollock, and executive editor Dean Baquet.