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.
In my last letter, I described some of the ways CC technologies get integrated into Web 2.0 applications. Many of you wrote that you were surprised by the examples, and were especially excited that the applications reached so broadly internationally. That response has led me to tell a bit more about CC as a global…
It has been suggested that there would be some value in CC entering the field of software licensing. I am skeptical (there are plenty of software licenses) but the explosion of mixed code/content platforms (e.g., Flash) has led me to at least get feedback about the idea. So if you have thoughts about this, I’d…
From last week’s email… The key is to build alternatives that creators on the Internet can use to both create as they wish and keep control of their creativity. That’s the challenge I see over the next four years. And as we review over the next few weeks some of the best of CC from…
[This email is part of a weekly series written by Lawrence Lessig about Creative Commons. If you would like to be removed from this list, please click here. Alternatively, if you know others who might find these interesting, please sign them up here.] In the four years since we launched CC, the Internet, and the…
So, with this email, Creative Commons launches its second (now officially) annual fundraising campaign. Last year, through the course of that first campaign, I wrote a series of letters explaining a bit about where Creative Commons came from, and where it was going. Those letters (creatively labeled “Lessig Letters”) are still available here. This year,…