Draft Lessig for Congress!!

Lawrence Lessig, a Penn alumnus, C ’83, W ’83, who is professor of law at Stanford Law School, is the focus of growing movement that is seeking to draft Lessig to run for Congress, in a special election, scheduled for April 8, to replace the late Rep. Tom Lantos (D-CA), who succumbed to cancer last week.

Current Penn students, especially the Class of 2010, should be familiar with Lessig as his most recent book, Free Culture, was the 2006 choice for the Penn Reading Project.

Last Friday, some of Lessig's former colleagues at Harvard launched a "Draft Lessig for Congress" group on Facebook. The Facebook group now has over 2,000 members and has a received much attention from all over the blogosphere, including at Openleft.com, TechCrunch and TechPresident.

Lessig's academic focus has recently changed focus towards the problem of corruption in the United States political process. What Lessig means by corruption is corruption of the political process:

That our government can’t understand basic facts when strong interests have an interest in its misunderstanding.

I don’t mean corruption in the simple sense of bribery. I mean “corruption” in the sense that the system is so queered by the influence of money . . .. Politicians are starved for the resources concentrated interests can provide. In the US, listening to money is the only way to secure reelection. And so an economy of influence bends public policy away from sense, always to dollars.

The possibility of Lessig being elected to Congress is truly exciting in terms of what it will mean for the advancement of very important issues such as net neutrality, free culture, copyright and the undue influence of concentrated interests in Washington. I encourage you to join the Facebook group and maybe we could even form a group of Penn students for Lessig for Congress. It would also be great to see Penn alums in the San Francisco area get involved with the Draft Lessig effort.

~BT