Lessig Ditches Cyberlaw to Focus on Campaign Finance
Screen shot of Lessig’s tweet.
Cyberlaw expert Lawrence Lessig, sometimes called the “Paul Revere of the digital age,” is sounding the alarm about campaign finance.
“We need not so much a declaration of independence as a declaration for independence,” he told a university audience. “These institutions of public trust need to be constructed in such a way that we can sustain our faith.”
Speaking at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management on Thursday night, he called on his audience to join his Change Congress movement at strike4change.org, a grassroots campaign to halt donations to politicians who do not support reform. He said the only way to restore trust in government and public life is for citizens to fund campaigns directly with small contributions, or indirectly by funneling money through the Treasury.
Lessig’s lecture topic may have come as a surprise to many in the audience, considering the forum was billed by Kellogg as focusing on his cyberlaw passions. But those who followed Lessig’s Twitter feed would have been forewarned when he tweeted, “Speaking at Kellogg (Evanston, IL) tonight, but not about what they think I’m talking about.”
The Stanford University law professor said he decided 18 months ago, after devoting a decade to Internet protocol and intellectual property issues, to set aside that work in order to tackle more fundamental change.
His Internet work built a wide following, he said, yet “we consistently faced the same struggles in Washington.”
“What I realized is that the destructive debilitating dependency [on money to win re-election] that made IP policy so bad was exactly the same destructive, debilitating dependency that was making policy everywhere so bad.”
More on Lessig’s New Venture:
Huffington Post: “Is John Conyers Shilling for Special Interests?”
