Lawrence Lessig is a thirty-nine year old constitutional lawyer and professor at the Stanford Law School. From 1997 to 2000, he was a professor at the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society at Harvard, and from 1991 to 1997, a professor at the Chicago Law School.  He served as a law clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court and to Judge Richard Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, both of whom he now disagrees with on key areas of the law, so much so that friends, jokingly, say he resembles Oedipus, the mythical Greek king who killed his father.  He has been a close observer of the Internet and its culture for the last seven years. Lessig  taught one of the first "Laws of cyberspace" classes at an academic law school in 1995, and has taught five different Internet related classes. He has participated in over eighty conferences about cyberspace and its regulation. He has become one of the most prominent commentators on law and cyberspace, largely through his academic writing, newspaper articles for The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the LA Times, a regular magazine column for The Industry Standard, and  his book Code and the other laws of  cyberspace. 

Lessig has been active in a number of Internet-related law suits and policy decisions. He testified before Congress on the Child Online Protection Act and a case challenging an injunction against sites that carried software to crack the  program "CyberPatrol".  His involvement in the Microsoft Antitrust Case elevated his recognition and prestige.  Judge Penfield Jackson, the judge in the Microsoft antitrust monopoly case asked Lessig to provide guidance on the Microsoft antitrust case, where Microsoft was charged with improperly merging its Web browser into the Windows operating system.  Lessig turned in a  forty-five page brief that laid out the strategy for finding Microsoft guilty of antitrust violations.   In 2001, Napster asked Lessig to give testimony in the case of  A&M records vs. Napster Inc.  In his brief, Lessig wrote, "It would be a mistake to judge an Internet technology based on its current use, even if significant violations of copyright were enabled." (Lessig. Napster, p.22.)

Lessig believes that the Internet can threaten privacy and free speech if it is not properly governed by the courts and laws. He seeks a balance between between the various controlling forces that are trying to control the Internet: e-commerce, government, and corporations, all of whom have various, and often competing,  agendas for the Internet. He believes the laws and the courts can help control the basic architecture of the Internet to secure the freedom of thought and expression that the Internet seemed to promise in its early stages of development.. 

"Cyberspace has an architecture; its code - the software and hardware that defines how cyberspace is - is its architecture. That architecture embeds certain principles; it sets the terms on which one uses the space; it defines what's possible in the space.  And these terms and possibilities affect innovations in that space. Some architectures invite innovations; others chill it." (Lessig. Code in law and law in code. 2000. p. 1)

Lessig writes and speaks with a passion.  His testimony before the Committee on the Judiciary U.S. House of Representatives in May 1998 certainly reflects this informed passion.

"Throughout the history of the Soviet Empire, the Russian people were bugged. Originally, they were bugged by other Russians -- spies and neighbors who would monitor the comings and goings of the suspicious. But later they were bugged by bugs -- technologies that made it possible for the state to listen to conversations through walls, or listen to conversations on the phone. This bugging behavior was common; very few places were safe; the private became that space where the monitoring technologies could not reach. They found privacy in public places, since privates had been invaded by technology  " (Lessig. Anti-paparazzi.  1998. par. 1, 2.) 

Lessig believes that if we published the software code that controls the Net so everyone could see it, this would prevent code  from being owned and controlled by corporations. This advocacy for open source code has  won him support from Robert Young, chairman of Red Hat, a provider of the open source code Linux software. "He's a hero of mine", said Robert Young.  "His gift is to take complex technology issues and simplify them so they can be explained to the general citizenship, and that's very helpful." (Young IN Zitner, 2000. par.30)

He is widely travelled.  In the early eighties, he travelled through every European Communist state that would let him in. In 1996, he travelled, or wandered, through Vietnam.  He went there to learn how the state exercises control over its citizens, only to discover that the people of Vietnam are far less regulated in their daily lives than people of the United States. 

Lessig was married in 1999 to Bettina Neuefeind, a German-born lawyer who investigated Kosovo war crimes.  Lessig describes his boldest act as smuggling a heart valve into the Soviet Union for a Jewish dissident in 1985.  He hid it in the crotch of his pants.