Saturday, February 16, 2008

More on Lessig for Congress

From TechCrunch

With the death of California Representative Tom Lantos on Monday, a special election will be held in April to fill his seat in Congress. Will Stanford Law professor Lawrence Lessig run? Already on Facebook, a “Draft Lessig for Congress” group has formed (with 554 members as of this posting). Lessig, who has long been a champion of Free Culture as a lecturer, intellectual property lawyer, and CEO of Creative Commons, has recently turned his attention to corruption. (He has a wiki about corruption here). In fact, his last lecture on Free Culture, which he has been giving for ten years, was on January 31.

Facebook screenshot of Lessig for congress group

People are making lots of hay out of the fact that Lessig registered the domain name “Change-Congress.com,” but to me this just sounds like preparation for his new work on government corruption.

Although I’m a fan of Lessig’s and I think he would make a great legislator, I wonder whether he would be interested in this post. It seems to me that he could have more influence on government as an outsider, and he wouldn’t feel the constant pressure to campaign that would hound him if he were an elected official.

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