Person: Lessig III, Lester
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Lessig III
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Lester
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Lessig III, Lester
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Publication A Reply to Professor Hasen(Harvard University, Harvard Law School, 2012) Lessig III, LesterPublication The Architecture of Innovation(Duke University School of Law, 2002) Lessig III, LesterPublication Law Regulating Code Regulating Law(2003) Lessig III, LesterPublication Fidelity and Constraint(1997) Lessig III, LesterPublication A Reply to Professors Cain and Charles(California Law Review Inc., 2014) Lessig III, LesterThis Reply follows the responses of Professor Bruce Cain and Professor Guy-Uriel Charles to Professor Lessig’s essay "What an Originalist Would Understand 'Corruption' to Mean," 102 Calif. L. Rev. 1 (2014).Publication What an Originalist Would Understand "Corruption" to Mean(California Law Review Inc., 2014) Lessig III, LesterAs important as "that" is "how." It is commonplace to say of the United States Congress that it is "corrupt." But it is critical, if we are to reform that corrupt institution, to say how it is corrupt. In what sense? According to what meaning? For what reasons? For the United States Congress is not corrupt in any traditional (albeit modern) sense of the term. Congress is not filled with criminals. Its members are not seeking bribes or using their official influence for private gain. In this sense, as Dennis Thompson offers, our Congress is likely the least corrupt Congress in the history of that institution.1 These are not bad souls bending the public weal to private ends. The institution is not corrupt because it is filled with a bunch of corrupt individuals. Instead Congress is corrupt at the level of the institution. We can presume the individuals within the institution are innocent; the economy of influence that they have allowed to evolve is not. Members of Congress, of course, are ultimately responsible for the influence they have allowed to evolve. But there is a distinction between being responsible and being corrupt: the bartender may well be responsible for the alcoholic's accident; that doesn't make her a drunk. And that is the objective of this short Essay: to see how an institution can be corrupt even if its members are not. I base the argument on the Brennan Center's Jorde Symposium lecture that I had the honor of presenting at Berkeley Law in January of 2013. But lectures are not (or should not be) essays. So while this Essay draws from that lecture, it reaches beyond it. In particular, it is enriched by the generous and careful criticism of election law maven Rick Hasen. I take the opportunity in this Essay to also reply to him more carefully. It is my claim that this "corruption"-what I call "dependence corruption"-should be easy for an originalist to see. Indeed, as this Essay will insist, only a non-originalist could reject it. That fact, if correct, makes the views of the originalists on the Supreme Court about the scope of the term "corruption" all the more puzzling, even as it also makes traditional reformers uncomfortable.Publication Keynote: The International Information Society(2004) Lessig III, LesterPublication Keynote Address: Commons and Code(1999) Lessig III, LesterPublication The Limits in Open Code Regulatory Standards and the Future of the Net(1999) Lessig III, LesterPublication Keynote Address: On What Being a (Small R) Republican Means(2013) Lessig III, LesterThis Article is an edited, annotated transcript of the Keynote Address delivered by Professor Lawrence Lessig at the Montana Law Review’s Honorable James R. Browning Symposium on Election Law, The State of the Republican Form of Government in the States: Debating Democracy’s Future, held at The University of Montana School of Law on September 27, 2012.
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