Lessig, Lawrence

1961–

Cyberlaw Expert, Author

Lawrence Lessig is an important figure in defining the scope of cyberspace law as an author, legal adviser, and law professor, and has been at or near the center of most of the key cyberlaw cases of the young Digital Age. He has been dubbed both “a James Madison of our time” and “the Paul Revere of the Web.” His singular analysis and understanding of cyberspace's legal complications (and hence of cyberspace governance), and the warnings that he has issued as a result, earned him both labels. BusinessWeek magazine, for one, has dubbed Lessig “the most original thinker in the new field of cyberlaw.”

Lessig was born on June 3, 1961, in Rapid City, South Dakota. Lessig's father, Lester L. “Jack” Lessig, owned a steel-fabrication firm in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, the city where Lessig grew up. His mother, Patricia, sold real estate for a time as a hobby. In an email interview for this encyclopedia, Lessig said that his early interests were stamp collecting, music, and politics. “A right-wing loon I was,” he says now. “Only music has survived.”

Loony or otherwise, Lessig nearly made a career of conservative politics. As a teenager, he was president of the Pennsylvania Teenage Republicans, and seemed destined to be a conservative's darling. While still a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania in 1980, he was hired to manage a key U.S. Senate race. However, despite that year's Reagan landslide, his candidate lost, pushing him away from politics.

Lessig earned a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1983, then a master's degree in philosophy from Cambridge University in 1986. He got his law degree from Yale University in 1989. He served as a clerk for Judge Richard Posner, an influential, conservative Illinois federal circuit-court judge, and later for U.S. Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia. Eventually he abandoned Republican politics. By the time of his graduation from Yale, he began questioning the prevailing anti-government sentiments of conservative political leaders and the courts.

The fall of communism also played a role in his transformation; touring Eastern Europe during a college break in 1982, he saw firsthand the extremes to which bureaucracies could resort in attempting to maintain authority in the face of revolutionary change. By the mid-1990s, the Internet had begun to radically transform parts of American society, and Lessig saw the government and the corporations clinging in similar ways to their power bases, attempting to thwart these changes. Lessig has said that his goal in the face of this struggle is to identify the basic rules that society should adopt in preventing capitalistic interests from grinding digital progress to a halt.

Lessig rejects the Internet culture's usual libertarianism, in which the free will of the individual is prized above all, and in which government involvement is perceived as something akin to leprosy. He disagrees with the common wisdom that says that the Internet cannot be regulated. Indeed, while Lessig says that he remains skeptical of government intervention, he strongly favors regulation and judicial activism on Internet issues when there is no other way to protect the individual's rights. He calls himself “a constitutionalist,” but he argues that constitutional interpretations need to be periodically updated to protect against new threats to freedom that were not conceived of by the Constitution's framers in the late eighteenth century.

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