Legal News

Larry Lessig: From Copyright to Politics, from Stanford (Back) to Harvard

By Dan Slater

News out of Boston: Stanford’s Larry Lessig is moving to Harvard to become the faculty director of Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics. It’s a return for Lessig. Prior to joining the Stanford faculty in 2000, he was on the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School and Harvard Law School. The news came via a press release from Harvard.

At Harvard, he won’t be focusing exclusively on intellectual property — the topic that made him famous. He’ll, in the words of Harvard, launch a “five-year project examining what happens when public institutions depend on money from sources that may be affected by the work of those institutions — for example, medical research programs that receive funding from pharmaceutical companies whose drugs they review, or academics whose policy analyses are underwritten by special interest groups.”

“I am very excited to be returning to Harvard to work on a project of enormous importance to our democracy,” said Lessig.

In February, when the Law Blog spoke to Lessig about his decision to refocus his scholarship from copyright to eliminating the role of money in politics, he told us this: “There’s a lot of talk in [the 2008 presidential election] about change, but the reality is that change never comes from a president alone. Even if the most aggressive ‘change president’ is elected, it’ll still take a lot more.”

He continued: “The intellectual issues at stake in the copyright debate aren’t very hard. But you look across the range of issues that the government is involved in there’s a whole host that, in my view, are affected by the corroding influence of money. I don’t have any problem with money. Money is great in the right place, but it’s not great in your engine. And it’s not great in certain ways that distort the policy-making process.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on December 12, 2008 (boomark / email).