Constitutional Law

Prof. Lawrence Lessig on Money and Politics, Clerking for J. Scalia, and the Death Penalty

At this year’s Netroots Nation conference in Austin, Texas, Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig spoke about a new initiative he is involved in called Change Congress. The program’s goal is to “reduce the distorting influence of money in Washington.” (More)

At the end of his 45-minute talk (starting at 6:10 in the video), Professor Lessig answered questions from the audience. He discussed his clerkship interview with Justice Antonin Scalia (53:18), his views on the death penalty (54:24), and the appropriate response to the Supreme Court’s decisions stemming from Buckley v. Valeo, the case that equated money with speech (58:40).

Spoilers after the jump.

Regarding his clerkship interview with Justice Scalia, Professor Lessig explained that the Justice offered him the job, but then left for lunch with the condition that Professor Lessig not tell the other clerks of the offer until he returned. For the next two hours, Justice Scalia’s clerks attacked Lessig for his liberal views. When the Justice returned, he told the clerks that he had hired Lessig.

Professor Lessig explained that “you can’t believe in the death penalty once you’ve seen the way the system works.” He recalls witnessing a fellow clerk — who supported the death penalty — crying at his desk because there was a claim on appeal that he did not have time to present.

He also explained his views on the Supreme Court case Buckley v. Valeo, which held that money equals speech. Agreeing that the Supreme Court reached the wrong result in the 1976 case, he argued that advocates for change need to focus on creating a doctrine to limit the role of money in politics that will survive the Court’s scrutiny. If that effort fails, however, he suggested that the best focus of finance reform efforts is not to appoint better justices, an effort that could take years, but rather to amend the Constitution itself.

Full post as published by ACS Blog on July 22, 2008 (boomark / email).