Mark Hemingway on Lawrence Lessig on National Review Online:
Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig hates corruption. He hates it so much, in fact, that last year he announced he’d be shifting away from his work on copyright and trademark law — on which he’s one of the leading experts in the country, especially when it comes to emerging digital, broadcast, and Internet technologies — to focus on it. He hates it so much he considered running for Tom Lantos’s seat in Congress, at the behest of an Internet campaign to draft him. (After a few days of soul-searching, he decided against it.)
The shift to studying politics isn't a dramatic as it may sound, however. Lessig was a teenage Reaganite, and later a noted libertarian, before drifting leftward — he now calls himself a “progressive Democrat.” Along the way he clerked for judge Richard Posner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, widely considered one of the most influential jurists of the past century, and Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia.
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