Lawrence Lessig

Lester Lawrence Lessig III (born June 3, 1961) is an American legal scholar, academic, 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. Lessig was a candidate for the Democratic Party's nomination for president of the United States in the 2016 U.S. presidential election but withdrew before the primaries.

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

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 earned a B.A. degree in economics and a B.S. degree in management (Wharton School) from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. degree in philosophy from the University of Cambridge (Trinity) in England, and a J.D. degree 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.

Lessig started his academic career at the University of Chicago Law School, where he was a 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. 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."