The UNC Center for Media Law and Policy will host a lecture by Lawrence Lessig, the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School, at the UNC School of Law on Monday, March 4. The lecture, which is free and open to the public, will take place at 6:30 p.m. in the rotunda at the law school.
Lessig, who is also the director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard, will speak on “Rooting out Corruption in Politics: Complicity and Complacency by the Media.”
“How have good people, with good intentions, allowed our democracy to be co-opted by outside interests, weakening our institutions and especially public trust in those institutions?” asks Lessig. He will address what role the media have played in this weakening and what their role should be going forward.
Prior to joining Harvard, Lessig taught at Stanford Law School, where he founded the school’s Center for Internet and Society, and at the University of Chicago. Lessig spent a decade arguing for sensible intellectual property law, updated for the digital age. He was a founding board member of Creative Commons, an organization that builds better copyright practices through principles established first by the open-source software community.
Lessig has published seven books, most recently "Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress – and a Plan to Stop It." He is a nationally renowned speaker on topics from intellectual property and Internet policy to American politics and has given two TED Talks.
“We are very excited to have Professor Lessig speak at UNC-Chapel Hill,” says David Ardia, assistant professor of law and co-director of the UNC Center for Media Law and Policy. “The economy of influence that weakens the effectiveness of our political institutions undoubtedly applies to the media as well. Professor Lessig has a remarkable ability to get us to focus our gaze on the root of the problems we face as a society and to mobilize action, even when those problems seem insurmountable.”
The talk will be live-streamed at medialaw.unc.edu.
About the UNC Center for Media Law and Policy
The UNC Center for Media Law and Policy, founded in 2006, is a forum for study and debate about the broad array of media law and policy issues facing North Carolina, the nation and the world. The center builds on the extraordinary strengths of UNC-Chapel Hill’s highly regarded law and journalism schools to explore the legal and policy issues affecting traditional media organizations and the challenges and opportunities posed by new communication technologies, including social media, the Internet and mobile technology. For more information on the center, go to medialaw.unc.edu.
-February 22, 2013