Legal professor Lawrence Lessig accepts the award for lifetime achievement at the 2014 Webby Awards on Monday, May 19, 2014, in New York. Harvard Law professor Lessig exploring White House bid

Another Democrat is about to step into the presidential ring.

Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig is exploring a bid for the White House, according to a website announcing the plan. He aims to crowdsource enough money on the Internet to “mount a credible campaign” in the Democratic primary, the website says.


Lessig’s candidacy is aimed at securing passage of the Citizen Equality Act of 2017, a legislative proposal for voter protection laws, new methods for electing representatives and a greater focus on citizen-funded elections.

In his launch video, he explains that he is running to put “citizen equality” on the map, and unless a leading candidate, “whether Hillary, or Bernie, or Joe, or someone else” adopts that mantle, Lessig himself would run as a “referendum president,” serving only as long as it takes to pass that agenda.

Lessig has been at the center of technology policy debates for decades and, more recently, has turned his attention to campaign-finance reform.

At the end of July, he left his position as chairman and CEO of Mayday PAC, a high-profile, nonpartisan super PAC he co-founded to back candidates committed to reforming campaign-finance laws. Mayday raised money from wealthy tech donors like LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Napster co-founder Sean Parker. But despite spending more than $10 million in 2014, the super PAC had a spotty record of success, seeing victory in just two of the eight races it targeted, according to an analysis by POLITICO.

For many years, Lessig functioned as something of the Internet’s philosopher-king. His 1999 book, “Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace,” was a foundational text in the then-dawning debate over regulating the Internet. In 2001, he founded the organization Creative Commons to redefine how copyright law operates online. Lessig advocated loudly for the aggressive net neutrality rules adopted by the FCC in February.

Lessig and Barack Obama were colleagues at the University of Chicago, but after throwing his weight behind Obama’s candidacy, Lessig later expressed disappointment with the president. In 2010, he wrote that “Obama’s strategy as president has not been to ‘change the way Washington works.’ Rather, he has pushed reforms in the same old way, with the same old games.”

While a professor at Stanford, Lessig considered running for Congress in California but ultimately decided not to enter that race.