As 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. 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.
This extraordinary book explains the engine that has catapulted the Internet from backwater to ubiquity-and reveals that it is sputtering precisely because of its runaway success. With the unwitting ...help of its users, the generative Internet is on a path.
I am grateful to Professor Cain and Professor Charles for their insightful and careful replies. I am grateful as well to the 'California Law Review' for giving me a chance to offer a brief reply.
How the law and cyberspace connect - problems of regulation in cyberspace - increasing cyberspace regulability - limits on the power of law to regulate code - how the code is owned will affect ...whether it can be regulated - problems of privacy - law alone cannot guarantee legal values.
Foreword Lessig, Lawrence
The University of Chicago law review,
08/2019, Volume:
86
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
...doctrine provided the framework from which Posner built, or to which Posner built. ...Douglas Baird sees first principles guiding Posner's development of promissory estoppel in contract law, as ..."the inner logic of the common law rules"9 began an inquiry that was then rendered subtle and specific by the specifics of the facts. "16 Thus, mandamus doctrine gets "bent," Dan Klerman writes, to permit a thicker review of certification decisions in class action litigation;17 Article III constraints are relaxed, Eugene Kontorovich argues, to enable more aggressive judicial review;18 and multifactor balancing tests get replaced, Yair Listokin insists, with tests focused more directly on the substance of the results.19 Even when the authors conclude that the judge was ultimately incorrect, the error was motivated by a desire to make the law make more practical sense. Three focus on the common law-contract,40 tort,41 and property law.42 Four on putatively statutory fields-copyright,43 patents,44 tax,45 and antitrust.46 Two touch roughly constitutional norms, as they consider the limits of federal policing of the administrative state47 and judicial policing of its own jurisdiction.48 One considers directly the work of courts, and the doctrines that might add to the efficacy of courts doing justice.49 And one hides a strong view about the character of this judge under an essay putatively about a fight over fiduciary obligations with mutual funds.50 Whatever the quibbles, all reveal a common respect for the extraordinary work of a judge not hesitant to press pragmatic reason into law. 3 See, for example, Stephen J. Choi and G. Mitu Gulati, Choosing the Next Supreme Court Justice: An Empirical Ranking of Judge Performance, 78 S Cal L Rev 23, 50-51 (2004) (finding Posner to be the most cited federal judge, and cited more than four standard deviations above the mean, for the period 1998-2000); Christopher C. McCurdy and Ryan P. Thompson, The Power of Posner: A Study of Prestige and Influence in the Federal Judiciary, 48 Idaho L Rev 49, 56 (2011) (finding exceptionally high citation and invocation rates starting immediately after Posner joined the bench); William Domnarski, The Correspondence of Henry Friendly and Richard A. Posner 1982-86, 51 Am J Legal Hist 395, 395 n 2 (2011) (noting that Friendly and Posner were cited by "name by the U.S. Supreme Court, the U.S. Courts of Appeals, and the U.S. Districts Court more often by far than any other circuit court judges"); Fred R. Shapiro, 29 J Legal Stud at 424-26 (cited in note 1).
Foreword Lawrence LESSIG
The University of Chicago law review,
08/2019, Volume:
86, Issue:
S1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Richard Posner is the most prolific federal judge and academic in the history of American law. He is also among the most influential. Posner authored dozens of books and hundreds of articles before ...his retirement from the bench in 2017. He signed more than 3,300 judicial opinions. Those works are among the most cited of any judge. They show a constant and wide-ranging influence on the law. In the academy, the "differential in terms of total influence on the casebooks between Posner and almost all other judges is staggering."
It has become increasingly common for a reader to follow a URL cited in a court opinion or a law review article, only to be met with an error message because the resource has been moved from its ...original online address. This form of reference rot, commonly referred to as ‘linkrot’, has arisen from the disconnect between the transience of online materials and the permanence of legal citation, and will only become more prevalent as scholarly materials move online. The present paper*, written by Jonathan Zittrain, Kendra Albert and Lawrence Lessig, explores the pervasiveness of linkrot in academic and legal citations, finding that more than 70% of the URLs within the Harvard Law Review and other journals, and 50% of the URLs within United States Supreme Court opinions, do not link to the originally cited information. In light of these results, a solution is proposed for authors and editors of new scholarship that involves libraries undertaking the distributed, long-term preservation of link contents.
Remix Lessig, Lawrence
2008, 2009, 2009-01-01
eBook
Open access
This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Lawrence Lessig, the reigning authority on intellectual property ...in the Internet age, spotlights the newest and possibly the most harmful culture war-a war waged against our children and others who create and consume art. Copyright laws have ceased to perform their original, beneficial role: protecting artists' creations while allowing them to build on previous creative works. In fact, our system now criminalises those very actions. By embracing "read-write culture," which allows its users to create art as readily as they consume it, we can ensure that creators get the support-artistic, commercial, and ethical-that they deserve and need. Indeed, we can already see glimmers of a new hybrid economy that combines the profit motives of traditional business with the "sharing economy" evident in such websites as Wikipedia and YouTube. The hybrid economy will become ever more prominent in every creative realm-from news to music-and Lessig shows how we can and should use it to benefit those who make and consume culture. Remix is an urgent, eloquent plea to end a war that harms our children and other intrepid creative users of new technologies. It also offers an inspiring vision of the post-war world where enormous opportunities await those who view art as a resource to be shared openly rather than a commodity to be hoarded.
Rendering Sensible Salient Lessig, Lawrence
The good society - PEGS (Organization),
12/2019, Volume:
27, Issue:
1-2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
In this essay, the author identifies the central challenge for democracy—crafting better ways to elicit a “we the people” that the people can respect. James Fishkin's work has pointed the way. This ...essay takes a few additional steps. First, the author discusses the influence of technology on democracy and the importance of building understanding of the need for Deliberative Polling in the “post-broadcast age.” He then suggests methods to make Deliberative Polling efficacious on a national level.
