Book Talk -- They Don't Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy with Author Lawrence Lessig

Date: 

Wednesday, November 13, 2019, 4:15pm to 5:30pm

Location: 

Allison Dining Room, 5th Floor, Taubman Building, Harvard Kennedy School

The Ash Center invites you to join a book talk with Lawrence Lessig, the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School and author of  They Don't Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy. This talk will be moderated by Tova Wang, Ash Center Visiting Democracy Fellow, AY 2019-2020. 

Refreshments will be served. 

Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy Book CoverAbout the book

Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig charts the way in which the fundamental institutions of our democracy, including our media, respond to narrow interests rather than to the needs and wishes of the nation’s citizenry. But the blame does not only lie with “them”—Washington’s politicians and power brokers, Lessig argues. The problem is also “us.” “We the people” are increasingly uninformed about the issues, while ubiquitous political polling exacerbates the problem, reflecting and normalizing our ignorance and feeding it back into the system as representative of our will.

About the author

Lawrence Lessig is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School. Prior to returning to Harvard, he taught at Stanford Law School, where he founded the Center for Internet and Society, and at the University of Chicago. He clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Antonin Scalia on the United States Supreme Court.

Cited by The New Yorker as “the most important thinker on intellectual property in the Internet era,” Lessig has focused much of his career on law and technology, especially as it affects copyright. His current work addresses “institutional corruption”—relationships which, while legal, weaken public trust in an institution—especially as that affects democracy.