Lawrence Lessig is a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and founder of the school’s Center for Internet and Society. He wrote the book on creative rights in the digital age and helped mount the case against Microsoft. More recently, Lessig represented Web site operator Eric Eldred in the ground-breaking case Eldred v. Ashcroft, a challenge to the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Lessig was named one of Scientific American’s Top 50 Visionaries, for arguing “against interpretations of copyright that could stifle innovation and discourse online.”
Lessig is the author of The Future of Ideas and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. He also chairs the Creative Commons project. Professor Lessig is a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a Board Member of the Center for the Public Domain, and a Commission Member of the Penn National Commission on Society, Culture and Community at the University of Pennsylvania.
Prior to joining the Stanford faculty, he was the Berkman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He was also a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. He clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, and Justice Antonin Scalia on the United States Supreme Court.
Lessig earned a B.A. in economics and a B.S. in management from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. in philosophy from Cambridge, and a J.D. from Yale. He teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional law, contracts, comparative constitutional law, and the law of cyberspace. His newest course is “Law and Virtual Worlds.”
Lessig’s lecture titled “Rebuilding the Creative Commons,” will take place in Skinner Memorial Chapel at 10:50 a.m.