Richard Posner
Posner speaking at the Harvard Federalist Society (2009)
Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit
Incumbent
Assumed office December 1, 1981
Nominated by	Ronald Reagan
Preceded by	Philip Tone
Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit
In office 1993–2000
Preceded by	William Bauer
Succeeded by	Joel Flaum
Personal details
Born	(1939-01-11) January 11, 1939 (age 73) New York City, New York, U.S.
Spouse(s)	Charlene Posner
Alma mater	Yale University Harvard University

Richard Allen Posner (born January 11, 1939) is an American jurist, legal theorist, and economist who is currently a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago and a Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. He is an influential figure in the law and economics school of thought.

He is the author of nearly 40 books on jurisprudence, economics, and several other topics, including Economic Analysis of Law, The Economics of Justice, The Problems of Jurisprudence, Sex and Reason, Law, Pragmatism and Democracy, and The Crisis of Capitalist Democracy. The Journal of Legal Studies has identified Posner as the most cited legal scholar of the 20th century.^[1]

Early life and education[link]

Born in New York City, Posner graduated from Yale College (A.B., 1959, summa cum laude), majoring in English, and from Harvard Law School (LL.B., 1962, magna cum laude), where he was first in his class^[2] and president of the Harvard Law Review. After clerking for Justice William J. Brennan of the United States Supreme Court during the 1962-63 term, he served as Attorney-Advisor to Federal Trade Commissioner Philip Elman; he would later argue that the Federal Trade Commission ought to be abolished.^[2] He went on to work in the Office of the Solicitor General in the U.S. Department of Justice, under Solicitor General Thurgood Marshall.^[2]

Legal career[link]

In 1968, Posner accepted a position teaching at Stanford Law School.^[2] In 1969, Posner moved to the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School, where he remains a Senior Lecturer and where his son Eric Posner is a Professor. He was a founding editor of the Journal of Legal Studies in 1972.

On October 27, 1981, Posner was nominated by President Ronald Reagan to a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit vacated by Philip Willis Tone.^[3] Posner was confirmed by the United States Senate on November 24, 1981, and received his commission on December 1, 1981. He served as Chief Judge of that court from 1993 to 2000 but remained a part-time professor at the University of Chicago.^[3]

Posner is a pragmatist in philosophy and an economist in legal methodology. He has written many articles and books on a wide range of topics including law and economics, law and literature, the federal judiciary, moral theory, intellectual property, antitrust law, public intellectuals, and legal history. He is also well known for writing on a wide variety of current events including the 2000 presidential election recount controversy, Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky^[3] and his resulting impeachment procedure, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

His analysis of the Lewinsky scandal cut across most party and ideological divisions. Posner's greatest influence is through his writings on law and economics, The New York Times called him "one of the most important antitrust scholars of the past half-century." In December 2004, Posner started a joint blog with Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker.^[4] He also has a blog at The Atlantic, where he discusses the financial crisis.^[5]

Posner was mentioned in 2005 as a potential nominee to replace Sandra Day O'Connor because of his prominence as a scholar and an appellate judge. Robert S. Boynton has written in The Washington Post that he believes Posner will never sit on the Supreme Court because despite his "obvious brilliance," he would be criticized for his occasionally "outrageous conclusions," such as his contention "that the rule of law is an accidental and dispensable element of legal ideology" his argument that buying and selling children on the free market would lead to better outcomes than the present situation, government-regulated adoption, and his support for the legalization of marijuana and LSD.^[6]

Legal positions[link]

Judge Posner making a dinner speech at Federal Trade Commission

In Posner's youth and in the 1960s as law clerk to William J. Brennan he was generally counted as a liberal. However, in reaction to some of the perceived excesses of the late 1960s, Posner developed a strongly conservative bent. He encountered Chicago School economists Aaron Director and George Stigler while a professor at Stanford.^[2] Posner summarized his views on law and economics in his 1973 book The Economic Analysis of Law.^[2]

Today, although generally considered a figure of the right, Posner's pragmatism, his qualified moral relativism and moral skepticism,^[7] and his affection for the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche set him apart from most American conservatives. Among his other influences are the American jurists Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and Learned Hand.

Abortion[link]

He has written several opinions sympathetic to abortion rights, including a decision that held that "partial-birth abortion" was constitutionally protected in some circumstances.^[8]

Animal rights[link]

Posner engaged in a debate on the ethics of using animals in research with the philosopher Peter Singer in 2001 at Slate magazine. He argues that animal rights conflict with the moral relevance of humanity and that empathy for pain and suffering of animals does not supersede advancing society.^[9] He further argues that he trusts his moral intuition until it is shown to be wrong and that his moral intuition says that "it is wrong to give as much weight to a dog's pain as to an infant's pain." He leaves open the possibility that facts on animal and human cognition can and may change his intuition in the future; he further states that people whose opinions were changed by consideration of the ethics presented in Singer's book Animal Liberation failed to see the "radicalism of the ethical vision that powers [their] view on animals, an ethical vision that finds greater value in a healthy pig than in a profoundly retarded child, that commands inflicting a lesser pain on a human being to avert a greater pain to a dog, and that, provided only that a chimpanzee has 1 percent of the mental ability of a normal human being, would require the sacrifice of the human being to save 101 chimpanzees."^[9]

Antitrust[link]

Along with Robert Bork, Posner helped shape the antitrust policy changes of the 1970s through his idea that 1960s antitrust laws were in fact making prices higher for the consumer rather than lower, while he viewed lower prices as the essential end goal of any antitrust policy.^[2] Posner and Bork's theories on antitrust evolved into the prevailing view in academia and at the Justice Department of the George H.W. Bush Administration.^[2]

Bluebook[link]

Posner is "one of the founding fathers of Bluebook abolitionism, having advocated it for almost twenty-five years, ever since his 1986 University of Chicago Law Review article^[10] on the subject."^[11] In a 2011 Yale Law Journal article,^[12] he wrote:

The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation exemplifies hypertrophy in the anthropological sense. It is a monstrous growth, remote from the functional need for legal citation forms, that serves obscure needs of the legal culture and its student subculture.^[11]

Breach of contract[link]

He has written favorably of efficient breach of contracts.^[13] Breach often leads to a worse result for society: if a seller breaches a contract to deliver building materials, the buyer's workers might go idle while the buyer looks for a replacement. The lost production is a cost to the company and its workers and, as such, is a social cost. An efficient breach would be a situation in which the benefits are higher than the costs, because the seller is better off for breaching even after paying damages to the buyer (for instance, if some third party had a much greater need for the building materials and was willing to pay a price high enough to outprice both the original receiver and offset the realized costs of breach of contract).

Drugs[link]

He opposes the US "War on Drugs" and called it "quixotic". In a 2003 CNBC interview, he discussed the difficulty of enforcing criminal marijuana laws and asserted that it is hard to justify the criminalization of marijuana, compared to other substances.

Newspapers[link]

Posner supported the creation of a law barring hyperlinks or paraphrasing of copyrighted material as a means to prevent what he views as free riding on newspaper journalism.^[14][15][16] His co-blogger Gary Becker simultaneously posted a contrasting opinion that while the Internet might hurt newspapers, it will not harm the vitality of the press, but rather embolden it.^[17]

Police recording[link]

As a judge on the 7th Circuit in Chicago, weighing a challenge to the Illinois Eavesdropping Act, which bars the secret recording of conversations without the consent of all the parties to the conversation. At issue was the constitutionality of the Illinois wiretapping law, which makes it illegal to record someone without consent even when filming public acts like arrests in public. Posner was one of three judges and interrupted the ACLU after just 14 words, stating, "Yeah, I know. But I’m not interested, really, in what you want to do with these recordings of peoples’ encounters with the police...." Posner continued: “Once all this stuff can be recorded, there’s going to be a lot more of this snooping around by reporters and bloggers.... I'm always suspicious when the civil liberties people start telling the police how to do their business.”^[18]

Prisoners[link]

In a dissent from an earlier ruling by his protégé Frank Easterbrook, Posner wrote that Easterbrook's decision that female guards could watch male prisoners while in the shower or bathroom must stem from a belief that prisoners are "members of a different species, indeed as a type of vermin, devoid of human dignity and entitled to no respect.... I do not myself consider the 1.5 million inmates of American prisons and jails in that light."^[2]

Privacy[link]

He famously opposed the right to privacy in 1981, arguing that the kinds of interests protected under privacy are not distinctive. He contended that privacy is protected in ways that are economically inefficient.

Torture[link]

When reviewing Alan Dershowitz's book, Why Terrorism Works: Understanding the Threat, Responding to the Challenge, Posner wrote in the September 2002 The New Republic that "If torture is the only means of obtaining the information necessary to prevent the detonation of a nuclear bomb in Times Square, torture should be used—-and will be used--to obtain the information.... No one, who doubts that this is the case, should be in a position of responsibility."^[19]

Judicial career[link]

Posner is one of the most prolific legal writers, through both the number and topical breadth of his opinions, to say nothing of his scholarly and popular writings.^[20] Unlike many other judges, he writes all his own opinions.^[2] Nobel Laureate economist Robert Solow says that Posner "is an apparently inexhaustible writer on... nearly everything. To call him a polymath would be a gross understatement.... Judge Posner evidently writes the way other men breathe."^[21]

Aside from the sheer volume of his output, Posner's opinions enjoy great respect from other judges, based on citations, and within the legal academy, where his opinions are taught in many foundational law courses. For example, his opinion in Indiana Harbor Belt Railroad Co. v. American Cyanamid Co., a staple of first year Torts courses taught in American law schools, where the case is used to address the question of when it is better to use negligence liability or strict liability.^[22]

In his decision in the 1997 case State Oil Co. v. Khan, Posner wrote that a ruling 1968 antitrust precedent set by the Supreme Court was "moth-eaten", "wobbly", and "unsound".^[2] Nevertheless, he abided by the previous decision with his ruling.^[2] The Supreme Court granted certiorari and overturned the 1968 ruling unanimously; Sandra Day O'Connor wrote the opinion and spoke positively of both Posner's criticism and his decision to abide by the ruling until the Court decided to change it.^[23]

In 1999, Posner was welcomed as a private mediator among the parties involved in the Microsoft antitrust case.^[3]

Awards and honors[link]

A 2004 poll by Legal Affairs magazine named Posner as one of the top twenty legal thinkers in the U.S.^[24]

In 2008, the University of Chicago Law Review published a commemorative issue: "Commemorating Twenty-five Years of Judge Richard A. Posner."^[25] A website, Project Posner, details all of Posner's many legal opinions.^[26] It was begun by Posner's former clerk, Tim Wu, who calls Posner "probably America's greatest living jurist."^[20] Another of Posner's former legal clerks, Lawrence Lessig, wrote, "There isn't a federal judge I respect more, both as a judge and person."^[27] The former dean of Yale Law School, Anthony T. Kronman, said that Posner was "one of the most rational human beings" he had ever met.^[2]

Bibliography[link]

The following is a selection of Posner's writings.

Selected books[link]

• 1981 The Economics of Justice, ISBN 978-0-674-23526-7
• 1988 Law and Literature: A Misunderstood Relation, ISBN 978-0-674-51468-3
• 1990 The Problems of Jurisprudence, ISBN 978-0-674-70876-1
• 1990 Cardozo: A Study in Reputation, ISBN 978-0-226-67556-5
• 1992 Sex and Reason, ISBN 978-0-674-80280-3
• 1995 Overcoming Law, ISBN 978-0-674-64926-2, Among the topics is a critique of Robert Bork's constitutional theories, review of books about the legal system in the Third Reich, and a discussion of the legal culture reflected in the works of Tom Wolfe and E.M. Forster.
• 1995 Aging and Old Age, ISBN 978-0-226-67568-8
• 1996 The Federal Courts: Challenge and Reform (2d ed.), ISBN 978-0-674-29627-5
• 1996 Law and Legal Theory in England and America, ISBN 978-0-19-826471-2
• 1998 Law and Literature (revised and enlarged ed.), ISBN 978-0-674-51471-3
• 1999 The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory, ISBN 978-0-674-00799-4
• 2001 Frontiers of Legal Theory, ISBN 978-0-674-01360-5
• 2001 Antitrust Law, 2nd ed., ISBN 978-0-226-67576-3
• 2001 Breaking the Deadlock: The 2000 Presidential Election and the Courts, ISBN 978-0-691-09073-3
• 2002 Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, ISBN 978-0-674-00633-1
• 2003 Law, Pragmatism and Democracy, ISBN 978-0-674-01081-9
• 2003 The Economic Structure of Intellectual Property Law (Harvard Univ. Press) (with William Landes), ISBN 978-0-674-01204-2
• 2004 Catastrophe: Risk and Response, ISBN 978-0-19-530647-7
• 2005 Preventing Surprise Attacks: Intelligence Reform in the Wake of 9/11, ISBN 978-0-7425-4947-0
• 2006 Uncertain Shield: The U.S. Intelligence System in the Throes of Reform, ISBN 978-0-7425-5127-5
• 2006 Not a Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency, ISBN 978-0-19-530427-5
• 2007 The Little Book of Plagiarism, ISBN 978-0-375-42475-5
• 2007 Economic Analysis of Law, 7th ed., ISBN 978-0-7355-6354-4
• 2007 Countering Terrorism: Blurred Focus, Halting Steps, ISBN 978-0-7425-5883-0
• 2008 How Judges Think, ISBN 978-0-674-02820-3
• 2009 Law and Literature, 3rd. ed., ISBN 978-0-674-03246-0
• 2009 A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression, ISBN 978-0-674-03514-0
• 2010 The Crisis of Capitalist Democracy, ISBN 978-0-674-00574-2
• 2010 Economic Analysis of Law, 8th ed., ISBN 978-0-7355-9442-5

Selected articles[link]

• The Federal Trade Commission, 37 U. Chi. L. Rev. 47 (1969)
• A Theory of Negligence, 1 J. Legal Stud. 29 (1972)
• The Economics of the Baby Shortage: A Modest Proposal, 7 J. Legal Stud. 323 (with Elisabeth M. Landes) (1978)
• Statutory Interpretation - In the Classroom and in the Courtroom, 50 U. Chi. L. Rev. 800 (1983)
• The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory, 111 Harv. L. Rev. 1637 (1998)
• Pragmatism Versus Purposivism in First Amendment Analysis, 54 Stan. L. Rev. 737 (2002)
• Transaction Costs and Antitrust Concerns in the Licensing of Intellectual Property, 4 J. Marshall Rev. Intell. Prop. L. 325 (2005)
• Foreword: A Political Court (The Supreme Court, 2004 Term), 119 Harv. L. Rev. 31 (2005)

See also[link]

• George W. Bush Supreme Court candidates
• Gary Becker
• American philosophy
• In re Aimster Copyright Litigation

References[link]

External links[link]

This article's use of external links may not follow Wikipedia's policies or guidelines. Please improve this article by removing excessive or inappropriate external links, and converting useful links where appropriate into footnote references. (March 2010)

• Richard Posner at the Biographical Directory of Federal Judges, a public domain publication of the Federal Judicial Center.
• Project Posner
• Richard A. Posner at the University of Chicago Law School
• Richard A. Posner at the University of Chicago
• The Becker-Posner Blog
• Posner's blog at The Atlantic
• Profile and Papers at Research Papers in Economics/RePEc
• Works by or about Richard Posner in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Richard Posner at the Internet Movie Database
• Richard Posner at the Internet Movie Database
• Appearances on C-SPAN
  • Booknotes interview with Posner on Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, June 2, 2002.
• Richard Posner on Charlie Rose
• Richard Posner collected news and commentary at The New York Times
• Richard A. Posner at the complete review
  • Complete-Review.com's "Reactions to Richard Posner's Public Intellectuals"
• "The Bench Burner", interview/article in The New Yorker, Dec. 10, 2001
• Lawrence A. Cunningham, Cardozo and Posner: A Study in Contracts, 36 William & Mary Law Review 1379 (1995)
• Soziale Innovation, Eine Serie in brand eins Folge 8: Wohlstandsmaximierung Article in the German economy magazine brand eins 8/2006
• Boldtype.com interview with Richard Posner on his new book, Little Book of Plagiarism
• "Secret trials for terrorists, says US judge", The Australian, June 29, 2007.
• Audio interview with Posner at National Review Online

Lawrence Lessig
Born	(1961-06-03) June 3, 1961 (age 51) Rapid City, South Dakota, U.S.
Occupation	Founder, Creative Commons Founder, Stanford Center for Internet and Society Professor, Harvard Law School
Spouse	Bettina Neuefeind
Website
lessig.org

Interview with Lawrence Lessig in 2009.

Lawrence "Larry" Lessig (born June 3, 1961) is an American academic and political activist. He is best known as a proponent of reduced legal restrictions on copyright, trademark, and radio frequency spectrum, particularly in technology applications, and he has called for state-based activism to promote substantive reform of government with a Second Constitutional Convention.^[1]

He is a director of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard University and a professor of law at Harvard Law School. Prior to rejoining Harvard, he was a professor of law at Stanford Law School and founder of its Center for Internet and Society. Lessig is a founding board member of Creative Commons, and also is on the board of MapLight.^[2] He is on the advisory boards of the Sunlight Foundation^[3] and Americans Elect.^[4] He is a former board member of the Free Software Foundation, Software Freedom Law Center and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.^[5]

Academic career[link]

Born in Rapid City, South Dakota, Lessig grew up in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, and earned a B.A. in Economics and a B.S. in Management (Wharton School) from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. in philosophy from the University of Cambridge (Trinity) in England, and a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School in 1989. After graduating from law school, he clerked for a year for Judge Richard Posner, at the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago, Illinois and another year for Justice Antonin Scalia at the Supreme Court.^[6]

Lessig started his academic career at the University of Chicago Law School, where he was Professor from 1991 to 1997. 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 Center for Internet & Society.^[6] He subsequently joined Stanford Law School, where he established the school's Center for Internet and Society.^[7]

Lessig returned to Harvard in December 2008 as Professor and Director of the "Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics".^[8]

Political activism[link]

Lessig is currently considered politically liberal. As a law clerk, however, he worked for both Judge Richard Posner and Justice Antonin Scalia, two influential conservative judges.

Lessig has emphasized in interviews that his philosophy experience at Cambridge radically changed his values and career path. Previously, he had held strong conservative or libertarian political views, desired a career in business, was a highly active member of Teenage Republicans, serving as the Youth Governor for Pennsylvania through the YMCA Youth and Government program^[9] 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 a graduate degree in philosophy there and develop his changed political values. During this time, he also traveled in the Eastern Bloc, so acquiring a lifelong interest in Eastern European law and politics.

Lessig refuses to embrace conventional libertarianism. While Lessig remains skeptical of government intervention, he favors regulation by calling himself "a constitutionalist". In his blog, Lessig came out in favor of then-Democratic primary candidate Barack Obama, citing the transformative nature of Obama's campaign as one of his chief reasons. 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.^[10]

In a speech in 2011, Lessig revealed that he was disappointed with Obama's performance in office, criticizing it as a "betrayal", and he criticized the president for using "the (Hillary) Clinton playbook".^[11] Lessig has called for state governments to call for a national constitutional convention,^[12] and that the convention be populated by a "random proportional selection of citizens" which he suggested would work effectively. He said "politics is a rare sport where the amateur is better than the professional."^[12]

Constitutional convention[link]

In 2010, Lessig began to organize for a national constitutional convention.^[13] He co-founded Fix Congress First! with Joe Trippi.^[14] Lessig called for a convention to propose amendments to the United States Constitution^[15] in a September 24–25, 2011 conference co-chaired by the Tea Party Patriots' national coordinator,^[16] in Lessig's October 5 book, Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress – and a Plan to Stop It,^[17] and at the Occupy protest in Washington, DC.^[18] Reporter Dan Froomkin said the book offers a manifesto for the Occupy Wall Street protestors, focusing on the core problem of corruption in both political parties and their elections.^[19] Lessig's initial constitutional amendment would allow legislatures to limit political contributions from non-citizens, including corporations, anonymous organizations, and foreign nationals, and he also supports public campaign financing and electoral college reform to establish the one person, one vote principle.^[20] Lessig's web site convention.idea.informer.com allows anyone to propose and vote on constitutional amendments.^[21]

Rootstrikers[link]

Change Congress, founded by Lessig and Joe Trippi, the Fix Congress First project, and the Rootstrikers project were created to help volunteers to address the problem of money in politics.^[22][23] In November 2011, Lessig announced all three projects would become part of the "United Republic". http://unitedrepublic.org/.  organization, along with Dylan Ratigan’s Get Money Out campaign.^[24][25]

Money in politics[link]

At the iCommons iSummit 07, Lessig announced that he will stop focusing his attention on copyright and related matters and will work on political corruption instead.^[26] This new work may be partially facilitated through his wiki, "Lessig Wiki", which he has encouraged the public to use to document cases of corruption.^[27] Lessig criticized the revolving door phenomenon in which legislators and staffers leave office to become lobbyists and have become beholden to special interests.^[28]

In February 2008, a Facebook group formed by law professor John Palfrey encouraged him to run for Congress from California's 12th congressional district, the seat vacated by the death of U.S. Representative Tom Lantos.^[29] Later that month, after forming an "exploratory project", the decision was made not to run for the vacant seat.^[30]

Despite having decided to forgo running for Congress himself, Lessig remained interested in attempting to change Congress to reduce corruption.^[30] To this end, he worked with political consultant Joe Trippi to launch a web based project called "Change Congress".^[31] In a press conference on March 20, 2008, Lessig explained that he hoped the Change Congress website would help provide technological tools voters could use to hold their representatives accountable and reduce the influence of money on politics.^[32] He is a board member of MAPLight.org, a nonprofit research group illuminating the connection between money and politics.

Lessig has known president Barack Obama since their days of both teaching law at the University of Chicago, and had been mentioned as a candidate to head the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates the telecommunications industry.^[33] However, this position is now held by Julius Genachowski.^[34]

At his talk at the 2009 Aspen Ideas Festival, Professor Lessig talked about Forbin Problems in a talk entitled Will Technology Change Our Lives?^[35] and also about his idea that the American public has lost faith in the central institution of our democracy, Congress.^[36]

Internet and computer activism[link]

"Code is law"[link]

In computer science, "code" typically refers to the text of a computer program (the source code). In law, "code" can refer to the texts that constitute statutory law. In his book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Lessig explores the ways in which code in both senses can be instruments for social control, leading to his dictum that "Code is law." 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.

Legislative reform[link]

Despite presenting an anti-regulatory standpoint in many fora, Lessig still sees the need for legislative enforcement of copyright. He has called for limiting copyright terms for creative professionals to five years, but believes that introducing the bureaucratic procedure needed to renew trademarks, by making copyright need to be renewed for up to 75 years after this five year term, would mean that creative professionals' work, many of the independent, would become more easily and quickly available.^[37] Lessig has repeated taken a stance that privatization through legislation like that seen in the 1980s in the UK with British Telecommunications is not the best way to help the Internet grow. He said, "When government disappears, it's not as if paradise will take its place. When governments are gone, other interests will take their place," "My claim is that we should focus on the values of liberty. If there is not government to insist on those values, then who?" "The single unifying force should be that we govern ourselves." ^[38]

Free Culture[link]

In 2002, Lessig received the Award for the Advancement of Free Software from the Free Software Foundation (FSF), and on March 28, 2004 he was elected to the FSF's Board of Directors.^[39] In 2006, Lessig was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.^[40] Lessig is also a well-known critic of copyright term extensions.

He proposed the concept of "Free Culture".^[41] He also supports free software and open spectrum.^[42] At his Free Culture keynote at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention 2002, half of his speech was about software patents, which he views as a rising threat to both free/open source software and innovation.

Lessig and Jimmy Wales at the iCommons iSummit07 in Dubrovnik.

In March 2006, Lessig joined the board of advisors of the Digital Universe project.^[43] A few months later, Lessig gave a talk on the ethics of the Free Culture Movement at the 2006 Wikimania conference.

Lessig claimed in 2009 that, because 70% of young people obtain digital information from illegal sources, the law should be changed.^[44]

Net neutrality[link]

Lessig has long been known to be a supporter of Net Neutrality. In 2006, he testified before the US Senate that he believed Congress should ratify Powell's four Internet freedoms and add a restriction to access-tiering, i.e. he does not believe content providers should be charged different amounts. The reason is that the Internet, under the neutral end-to-end design is an invaluable platform for innovation, and the economic benefit of innovation would be threatened if large corporations could purchase faster service to the detriment of newer companies with less capital. However, Lessig has supported the idea of allowing ISPs to give consumers the option of different tiers of service at different prices. He 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. He said, "Now, no doubt, my position might be wrong. Some friends in the network neutrality movement as well as some scholars believe it is wrong - that it doesn't go far enough. But the suggestion that the position is 'recent' is baseless. If I'm wrong, I've always been wrong." ^[45]

Combating sexual abuse[link]

In May 2005, it was revealed that Lessig had experienced sexual abuse by the director at the American Boychoir School which he had attended as an adolescent.^[46] Lessig reached a settlement with the school in the past, under confidential terms. He revealed his experiences in the course of representing another student victim, John Hardwicke, in court.^[47] In August 2006, he succeeded in persuading the New Jersey Supreme Court to restrict the scope of immunity radically, which had protected nonprofits that failed to prevent sexual abuse from legal liability.^[48]

Media references[link]

Lessig appears as a character in a 2005 episode of the television political drama The West Wing ("The Wake Up Call", season 6, episode 14). Lessig’s character, portrayed by Christopher Lloyd, is intended to be a realistic depiction including such details as citing his book The Future of Ideas and his expertise in Eastern European constitutional law.^[49]

Artist group Monochrom performed a "Love Song for Lessig" on Boing Boing TV in the November 15, 2007 episode.^[50] The German term "lässig" (meaning "cool" or "relaxed") is pronounced the same as Lessig's last name, and "Love Song for Lessig" uses the homonym for humor.

"Prometeus - The Media Revolution", a video produced by Italian internet consulting company Casaleggio Associati that attempts to predict the future of media over the next 40 to 50 years, proposes Lawrence Lessig to become the new US Secretary of Justice and declare copyright to be illegal in 2020.

Legal challenges[link]

Lessig's political opinions on copyright law have led to legal challenges where he has attempted to put them into action without legislative change. In March 2003 he 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 has sympathies for de-regulation, to back his "market-based" approach to intellectual property regulation.^[51]

Notable cases[link]

• Hardwicke v. American Boychoir (representing plaintiff John Hardwicke) Pending^[48]
• Golan v. Gonzales (representing multiple plaintiffs)
• Eldred v. Ashcroft (representing plaintiff Eric Eldred) Lost
• Kahle v. Ashcroft—(also see Brewster Kahle) Dismissed
• United States v. Microsoft (special master and author of an amicus brief addressing the Sherman Act^[52])
  • Lessig was appointed special master by Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson in 1997. The appointment was vacated by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.^[53] The appellate court ruled that the powers granted to Lessig exceeded the scope of the Federal statute providing for special masters. Judge Jackson then solicited Lessig’s amicus brief.
  • Lessig himself says about this appointment: "Did Justice Jackson pick me to be his special master because he had determined I was the perfect mix of Holmes and Ed Felten? No, I was picked because I was a Harvard Law Professor teaching the law of cyberspace. Remember: So is 'fame' made."^[54]
• MPAA v. 2600 (submitted an amicus brief with Yochai Benkler in support of 2600^[55])

Personal life[link]

Lessig is married to Bettina Neuefeind, and is the father of three children (Willem, Teo, and Tess) [1].

Bibliography[link]

• Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (2000) ISBN 978-0-465-03913-5
• The Future of Ideas (2001) ISBN 978-0-375-50578-2 - available as a free Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommerical (by-nc)
• Free Culture (2004) ISBN 978-1-59420-006-9 - available as a free Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial
• Code: Version 2.0 (2006) ISBN 978-0-465-03914-2 - available as a free Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (by-sa)
• Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (2008) ISBN 978-1-59420-172-1 - available as a free Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (by-nc-nd)
• Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--and a Plan to Stop It (2011) ISBN 978-0-446-57643-7

See also[link]

• 99 Percent Declaration
• Copyleft
• Free software movement
• Free content
• FreeCulture.org
• Open educational resources
• Gratis versus Libre
• Open content
• Law of the Horse
• Lobbying in the United States
• Second Constitution of the United States proposal for constitutional reform

References[link]