Harvard Portrait: Lawrence Lessig

Lawrence Lessig, newly appointed professor at the Law School, is an expert in the law of cyberspace, and he is as absorbed by his work as some people are by cyberspace itself. (Despite reportorial probing, he reveals no extralegal preoccupations and testifies that, "apart from my work, I haven't got a life.") He was a fellow last year in Harvard's Program in Ethics and the Professions and a visiting professor of law. Before that, he was professor of law at the University of Chicago and co-director of the Center for the Study of Constitutionalism in Eastern Europe. Lessig is writing what he calls a "dark book," in which he views the law of cyberspace as a kind of comparative constitutional law and explores the significance of the problems that the regulation of cyberspace might present. "The claim that cyberspace is unregulable is profoundly mistaken," he says. "Rather than push to regulate behavior in cyberspace, the government is trying to regulate software, the architecture of cyberspace, in ways that--when the government gets good at it--will dramatically reduce the freedom of the medium." There is value in the relative anarchy of cyberspace. Do we want this to disappear so quickly? Says Lessig pessimistically, "Our Constitution has been deified, and so we have lost the habit of asking what constitutional values should be. There is a creative half to constitutional law, but there's nobody to give it voice."

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