Legal News

Professor Lessig Goes to Washington, Maybe

By Dan Slater

When the Law Blog spoke to Stanford Law School’s Lawrence Lessig last week 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 this 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.”

At the time, we we didn’t give much thought to what “more” meant, but now we presume Lessig had himself in mind. On Tuesday, via his blog, Lessig launched a new website called lessig08.org. The new site explains two of Lessig’s latest projects — his “Change Congress” movement and his decision about whether to run for Congress. Huh?

Lessig writes: “I have decided I want to give as much energy as I can to the Change Congress movement. I will decide in the next week or so whether it makes sense to advance that movement by running for Congress.” (The new site also has a cool 10-minute video that lays out many of the problems Lessig sees in Washington, and his proposals for fixing them.) Find a WSJ report here, and an NYT article here.

Reportedly, Lessig would run in California’s 12th Congressional District, which lies south of San Francisco. The seat opened up with last week’s death of Tom Lantos , who, after 14 terms, had recently announced his plans not to run for re-election and instead endorse Jackie Speier, a former state senator.

As for the possibility of a Lessig candidacy, there’s already been breathless commentary at sites like draftlessig.org and Facebook, but our favorite quote is the one Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford, gave to the WSJ: “I think he would be the man from Mars in a good way,” said Zittrain. “I come from Silicon Valley, and I am here to change your ways.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on February 21, 2008 (boomark / email).