For the 2008 Symposium, Lawrence Lessig, J.D., professor of law at Stanford Law School and founder of the school’s Center for Internet and Society, presented the keynote address.
Prior to joining the Stanford faculty, he was the Berkman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and a professor at the University of Chicago. He clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Antonin Scalia on the United States Supreme Court.
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. He has won numerous awards, including the Free Software Foundation’s Freedom Award, and 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 Free Culture (2004), The Future of Ideas (2001) and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (1999). He chairs the Creative Commons project, and serves on the board of the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Public Library of Science, and Public Knowledge. He is also a columnist for Wired.
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, and the law of cyberspace.
For more information, see Steven Levy’s profile of Lessig in the October 2002 issue of Wired: Lawrence Lessig’s Supreme Showdown.
