Lawrence Lessig is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School. Prior to returning to Harvard, he taught at Stanford Law School, where he founded the Center for Internet and Society, and at the University of Chicago. He clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Antonin Scalia on the United States Supreme Court. He holds an honorary degree from the University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada, UCLouvain, Belgium, Lund Univeristy, Sweden, Athabasca University, Athabasca, Canada, Amsterdam University, Amsterdam.
Lessig is the founder of Equal Citizens and a founding board member of Creative Commons. He serves on the Scientific Board of AXA Research Fund, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He has received numerous awards including a Webby, the Free Software Foundation’s Freedom Award, Scientific American 50 Award, and Fastcase 50 Award. Lessig’s early work focused on law and technology, especially as it affects copyright. His current work addresses the failure of democracy, and innovations to reform democracy.
He is the author of hundreds of articles and essays, and a dozen books, including: They Don’t Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy (2019), Fidelity & Constraint: How the Supreme Court Has Read the American Constitution (2019), America, Compromised (2018), Republic, Lost v2 (2015), The USA is Lesterland (2014), One Way Forward (2012), Republic, Lost: How Money
Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It (2011), Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (2008), Code v2 (2006), Free Culture (2004), The Future of Ideas (2001), and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (1999).
Lessig holds a BA in economics and a BS in management from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA in philosophy from Cambridge University, and a JD from Yale.
It’s hard to believe that it was 13 years ago today that we shipped the very first version of the CC license suite. Before then, without the CC licenses, the barriers to collaborating in a global commons were too high. The benefits of shared educational content or scientific research, or paving the way for creators…
Help build the next era of sharing online.Make a donation to Creative Commons. 12 years ago today, we launched the first Creative Commons license suite. The internet was changing the way people share, and changing what it meant to be a creator. But copyright law hadn’t caught up. The Net was making sharing easy; the…
Lawrence Lessig at ETech 2008 / Ed Schipul / CC BY-SA I am thrilled to welcome Ryan Merkley as the incoming CEO of Creative Commons. This is an important moment in the history of the organization. After eleven years, CC licenses are globally recognized as the definitive tool for sharing creative works. Millions across the…
Lawrence Lessig and Aaron Swartz (2002) / Rich Gibson / CC BY Friends and Commoners, It is with incredible sadness that I write to tell you that yesterday, Aaron Swartz took his life. Aaron was one of the early architects of Creative Commons. As a teenager, he helped design the code layer to our licenses,…
Dear Fellow Creative Commoner: A week ago, Japan suffered its most devastating earthquake and tsunami in modern history. This disaster has left thousands of people dead, many others injured and displaced, and an estimated 1.5 million more without access to power. Furthermore, the compounding catastrophe with the country’s Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant will affect…