Lawrence Lessig

So, you know, I'm I'm thinking again about the sort of those the the era you just described where they were promising to bring democracy through social media and democracy.

You know, there was, I remember a piece by Lawrence Lessig, who is quite a, you know, influential critic of all the ways our democracy is broken.

But he's essentially saying, you know, we need to cheer on the Googles and Facebooks of the world over the old media dinosaurs.

And it was like, because they're new, right? Because they're new.

We'll explore the history of Article V conventions, competing perspectives, and their implication for the future of constitutional reform.

Lawrence Lessig is the Roy L. Fuhrman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School.

He convened the We the People conference and argues that an Article V convention could provide an essential path to constitutional reform, particularly when Congress is unwilling or unable to act.

Larry, welcome back to We the People.

You can't ever prove that kind of negatives, but the sort of notion, well, there's a country out there where it's all okay, that doesn't happen.

is a bundle of activities such as institutional corruption, Lawrence Lessig's arguments about activities that are not illegal.

They're not clearly illegal, but they abuse public trust.

Businesses forming quote-unquote research institutes at universities and those institutes turn out uh research results that surprisingly enough end up favoring those companies profits when it comes to regulatory decisions all legal and it abuses the public's trust in science the public's trust in academe which is under assault in in many places here i think mark warren has some important lessons to teach us about the meaning of corruption, especially in a democracy.

Hurdles include high bar requirements for ratification and uncertainty over who would control a convention's agenda.

It's supposed to be difficult, but beneath the debate lies a foundational question for a by-the-people democracy: Who gets to shape the nation's governing charter? "If we are a constitutional republic, we should be able to address our Constitution," says legal scholar Lawrence Lessig, "and I think not just the politicians, but ordinary people should be involved in that conversation as well." It's Tuesday, October 20th.

This is the Monitor Daily Podcast.

Good morning, I'm Ira Porter.

Uh, but even going back to, well, I mean, even going back to the, the Bush days of, of, uh, questions of legitimacy and challenging electors and so forth, but certainly in the Trump era, the, the somewhat ironic thing is, is Trump was very enthusiastic about these sorts of critiques in 2016 in an election that he won [chuckles] ultimately.

Um, you had a then sort of countervailing case, uh, from the other side, you know, beginning with I, I still remember the kind of Larry Lessig faithless elector push-

Mm-hmm

... which, given his role as the capital D defender of democracy ever since-

Again, I would say this is also burdening the individual at a ti- at a, in a place where the responsibility is probably best placed with the institution, because they can, with relative ease, imple- implement those kinds of protections for everyone, uh, rather than having customers or, you know, citizens who are of varying levels of time, interest, ability, you know, fear, conversant, you know, with, with technology or not.

Um, and so I'm, I'm, I'm thinking about, uh, you know, the defaults are law, and Larry Lessig said the code is law.

You know, what the defaults are set as, 90% of the people will leave them that way.

And so the call really, the, the call to action for companies is really set your security defaults at a place where the average consumer can trust that the device or the, you know, the item is, is relatively secure without them having to take those extraneous, you know, setting up a server, setting up a, you know, a, a web at, at the house should be, you know, not required.