Lawrence Lessig

Lawrence Lessig (born June 3, 1961) is a professor of law at Stanford Law School and founder of its Center for Internet and Society.

Prior to joining Stanford he taught at the Harvard Law School and the University of Chicago Law School. Although considered a liberal, he clerked for strongly conservative Judge Richard Posner and Justice Antonin Scalia. He was educated at the University of Pennsylvania (incl. Wharton), Trinity College, Cambridge, and Yale Law School.

In 2002, Lessig was awarded the FSF Award for the Advancement of Free Software from the Free Software Foundation (FSF), and on March 28 2004 he was elected to the FSF's Board of Directors.[1] Lessig is also a well-known critic of copyright term extensions.

He proposed the concept of "Free Culture" [1]. He also supports free software and open spectrum [1]. He is founder and chairman of the Creative Commons and a board member of the EFF.

At his "Free culture" keynote at OSCON 2002, half of his speech was also about software patents, which he views as a rising threat to both open source and innovation.

Lessig is on the board of directors of Software Freedom Law Center, launched in February 2005.

Lessig appears as a character in a 2005 episode of the television political drama The West Wing ("The Wake Up Call"), played by Christopher Lloyd. Although portrayed by Lloyd, Lessig's character in the episode is intended to be the same as in real-life; his 2002 book The Future of Ideas and his expertise in Eastern European constitutional law. The episode's screenwriter was Josh Singer, himself one of Lessig's former students, and his appearance in the show (where the character of Lessig assists the drafters of a Belorussian constitution), is loosely based on Lessig's involvement with work on the Georgiann constitution. (Lessig's comments on his blog)

Notable cases