The Failed Branch: Congress and the Hope for Reform

Wednesday, May 4, 2016

12:00 to 1:30 PM

240 Dockser Hall, 65 Forsyth Street, Boston

Professor Lawrence Lessig visited the law school on Wednesday, May 4, 2016, to speak on "The Failed Branch: Congress and the Hope for Reform." Co-sponsored by Northeastern University School of Law and Reforming Institutional and Systemic Corruption (RISC)

Lawrence Lessig is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School. In 2015, he entered the race for president of the United States to champion campaign finance reform and electoral reform. Though he ultimately decided to withdraw his candidacy, his thoughts on these issues are at the heart of two of his books: Republic Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress — and a Plan to Stop It and the update to that book, Republic Lost: Version 2.0. A co-founder of Creative Commons, Lessig is also a proponent of granting greater latitude to those seeking to promote dialogue via the radio frequency spectrum or through use of copyrighted and trademarked material.

Previously a faculty member at Stanford Law School, where he founded the school’s Center for Internet and Society, Lessig clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and Justice Antonin Scalia on the United States Supreme Court. He has received numerous awards, including the Free Software Foundation’s Advancement of Free Software award, Fastcase 50 award, “honoring the law’s smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries and leaders,” and the 2014 Webby Lifetime Achievement award for co-founding Creative Commons and defending net neutrality and the free and open software movement.

Lessig holds a BA in economics and a BS in management from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA in philosophy from the University of Cambridge and a JD from Yale Law School.

“Mr. Lessig’s vision is at once profoundly pessimistic — the integrity of the nation is collapsing under the best of intentions — and deeply optimistic. Simple legislative surgery, he says, can put the nation back on the path to greatness.”

— Thomas Edsall, “Putting Political Reform Right into the Pockets of the Nation’s Voters,” The New York Times