Lawrence Lessig

He grew up in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, the son of an engineer and a real-estate agent, and spent his adolescence as a serious Republican: Teenage Republicans, Pennsylvania's youth governor in 1978 through the YMCA program, a business career in view. A year abroad at Cambridge became three, and philosophy took the politics apart. He came back a liberal, went to Yale Law, and graduated in 1989. Two of the most conservative judges in the country then hired him anyway, Richard Posner on the Seventh Circuit and Antonin Scalia at the Supreme Court, choosing him for ability rather than agreement and installing him as the token liberal in chambers. Posner later called him the most distinguished law professor of his generation.

He taught at Chicago from 1991, helped the new Republic of Georgia draft a constitution, and in 1997 was appointed special master in the government's antitrust case against Microsoft, an appointment the D.C. Circuit vacated as exceeding the statute before turning around and asking him for a brief. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, in 1999, argued that software architecture regulates conduct as surely as statutes do, and compressed into a slogan: code is law. He founded Creative Commons in 2001 so that authors could license their work without hiring anyone. Free Culture followed in 2004 and Remix in 2008. Then he changed subjects. After talking with Aaron Swartz he turned from copyright to political corruption and wrote Republic, Lost in 2011.

He set out to fix copyright in court and lost. From 1999 he led the challenge to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, and in March 2003 the Supreme Court ruled against him. He said afterward that he had built the case around a market-based argument pitched at Chief Justice Rehnquist's taste for deregulation, and that the choice was his. The second act went much the same way. Mayday PAC, launched in 2014 to spend big money against big money, raised nearly 11 million dollars and watched seven of the eight non-incumbents it backed lose. In 2019 he defended MIT's handling of Jeffrey Epstein's money by arguing that if such donations are taken at all they should be taken in secret, sued the New York Times over its headline, and dropped the suit after the paper changed it.

One fight he won outright was personal. In 2005, while representing another former student, he disclosed that the director of the American Boychoir School had abused him as a boy. In August 2006 he persuaded the New Jersey Supreme Court to strip away much of the immunity shielding nonprofits from liability for failing to stop abuse. The rest stays open. He ran for the Democratic nomination in 2015 as a single-issue referendum candidate and withdrew that November when a debate-rule change locked him out. In 2020 he argued the faithless-elector case and lost 9 to 0. Creative Commons, the workaround he built after losing in court, is ordinary infrastructure. He was still teaching at Harvard Law in 2026.

Lawrence Lessig's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace book
  Code is law. Revised as Code: Version 2.0 in 2006 1999
• Creative Commons company
  Licenses letting authors release work on their own terms 2001
• The Future of Ideas book
  Written in the shadow of the case he was about to lose 2001
• Free Culture book
  The argument he could not win at the Supreme Court, made to everyone else 2004
• Republic, Lost book
  The turn from copyright to money in politics 2011
• How to Steal a Presidential Election book
  On the legal machinery that could overturn a result 2024

• 1978 aged ~17 Serves as Pennsylvania's youth governor through the YMCA program He was an active Teenage Republican and nearly went into Republican politics.
• 1986 aged ~25 Takes a philosophy degree at Cambridge that changes his politics A year abroad turned into three, with travel in the Eastern Bloc.
• 1989 aged ~28 Graduates from Yale Law and clerks for Judge Richard Posner Justice Antonin Scalia hired him the following year.
• 1997 aged ~36 Appointed special master in United States v. Microsoft The D.C. Circuit vacated the appointment, then asked him for an amicus brief instead.
• 2001 aged ~40 Founds Creative Commons
• March 2003 aged 41 Loses Eldred v. Ashcroft at the Supreme Court He said the strategy had been his and that he had aimed it at the wrong justice.
• August 2006 aged 45 Wins a New Jersey ruling narrowing charitable immunity in abuse cases He had disclosed the year before that he was abused at the American Boychoir School.
• November 2, 2015 aged 54 Withdraws from the Democratic presidential race A change in the debate participation rules had shut him out.
• July 6, 2020 aged 59 The Supreme Court rejects his faithless-elector argument, 9 to 0

• Aaron Swartz 1986–2013
  Internet activist and Reddit co-founder whose work on open access and web standards left a lasting legacy. changed the direction of his work
• Antonin Scalia 1936–2016
  Justice whose advocacy of originalism and textualism transformed American legal interpretation. clerked for
• Bill Gates b. 1955
  Co-founder of Microsoft who, through the Gates Foundation, has donated billions to global health and education. special master in the case against his company
• Tim Berners-Lee b. 1955
  British-American computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web, revolutionizing global information sharing. built the commons he wrote licenses for
• Vint Cerf b. 1943
  Co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols that form the foundation of the internet. designed the architecture he calls law