Lawrence Lessig ist Roy L. Furman Professor für Recht und Führung an der Harvard Law School. Vor seiner Rückkehr nach Harvard lehrte er an der Stanford Law School, wo er das Center for Internet and Society gründete, und an der University of Chicago. Er arbeitete für Richter Richard Posner am 7. Berufungsgericht und Richter Antonin Scalia am Obersten Gerichtshof der Vereinigten Staaten.
Lessig ist Gründer von Equal Citizens und Gründungsmitglied von Creative Commons und Mitglied des wissenschaftlichen Beirats des AXA Research Fund. Als Mitglied der American Academy of Arts and Sciences und der American Philosophical Society hat er zahlreiche Auszeichnungen erhalten, darunter einen Webby, den Freedom Award der Free Software Foundation, den Scientific American 50 Award und den Fastcase 50 Award.
Einst von The New Yorker als „der wichtigste Denker für geistiges Eigentum im Internetzeitalter“ bezeichnet, hat Lessig seinen Fokus von Recht und Technologie auf „institutionelle Korruption“ verlagert – Beziehungen, die zwar legal sind, aber insbesondere das Vertrauen der Öffentlichkeit in eine Institution schwächen denn das wirkt sich auf die Demokratie aus.
Lessig hat einen BA in Wirtschaftswissenschaften und einen BS in Management von der University of Pennsylvania, einen MA in Philosophie von der Cambridge University und einen JD von Yale.
One Way Forward: The Outsider's Guide to Fixing the Republic pdf von Lawrence Lessig
Something is clearly rotten in our Republic. Americans have lost faith in their politicians to a greater degree than ever, resigning themselves to the best Congress money can buy, as the comic Will Rogers once put it. It doesnt matter whether they are Democrats or Republicans, people are disillusioned and angry as hell. They feel like outsiders in their own nation, powerless over their own lives, blocked from having a real voice in how they are governed.
But all of this can changewe have the power. Lawrence Lessig, the renowned Harvard Law School professor, political activist, and author of the bestselling Republic, Lost, presents a clear-eyed, bipartisan manifesto for revolution just when we need it the most. One Way Forward is a rousing, eloquent, and ultimately optimistic call to action for Americans of all political persuasions. Notable in these viciously partisan times, Lessig pitches his address equally to Occupy Wall Streeters, Tea Party Patriots, independents, anarchists, and baffled citizens of the American middle. Despite our serious political differences, he argues, we canand mustchange the system for the better.
At the core of our government, Lessig says, is a legal corruption. In other words: money. The job of politics has been left to a tiny slice of Americans who dominate campaign finance and exert a disproportionate influence on lawgivers as a result. This, he writes, is a dynamic that would be obvious to Tony Soprano or Michael Corleone but that is sometimes obscure to political scientists: a protection racket that flourishes while our Republic burns.
We dont need to destroy wealth, Lessig declares. We need to destroy the ability of wealth to corrupt our politics.
With the common-sense idealism of his hero, Henry David Thoreau, Lessig shows how Americans can take back their country, and he provides a concrete and surprisingly practical set of instructions for doing it.
In a season where Americans are poised between the hope for real change and the fear that, once again, they wont get it, One Way Forward charts a course to a thrillingly new American future in which every citizen has a voice that matters, no matter how fat his or her wallet.