Lawrence Lessig presidential campaign, 2016/Federalism

	; ; Former presidential candidate; Lawrence Lessig
	Profession: ; Lawyer;
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Lawrence Lessig suspended his presidential campaign on November 2, 2015.^[1]

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This page was current as of the 2016 election.

In 2010, Lawrence Lessig supported Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court. "I think that from the experience I’ve had with Elena, which is now more than twenty years, I think that she has exactly the right values and exactly the right skill that this justice will need. This is the fourth justice in the non-conservative or non-right-wing bloc of this right-wing court. And what that means is she needs to have the ability to persuade the fifth, so that we can get five votes for values and positions that we believe in. And I think what she’s demonstrated more than anything else is she has exactly that skill," he said.^[2]

in response to Citizens United, Lawrence Lessig wrote an op-ed in New Republic in 2010 suggesting the decision could be combatted by remembering that corporations were not American citizens, regardless of whether they were considered "persons." Lessig encouraged the establishment of a new constitution amendment: "Nothing in this Constitution shall be construed to restrict the power to limit, though not to ban, campaign expenditures of non-citizens of the United States during the last 60 days before an election."^[4]

In June 2015, Lawrence Lessig said there was a false dichotomy between protecting privacy and guarding the nation in an interview with WGBH News. He explained, "[M]ost Americans have a false choice in their mind. Either we protect privacy, or we are facing terrorists. ... It isn't an either or a choice. There are ways that we can be building the infrastructure of surveillance that actually would be protecting privacy in a very fundamental way but give the government a better opportunity to identify risks that they need to go after. And we need to be pushing the government to do that, rather than this very simple binary choice of well, we're either going to have terrorists or we're going to have protection of privacy."^[5]

In 2008, Lawrence Lessig said regardless of a person's theoretical position on the death penalty, he "cannot support the death penalty once [he sees] how the system actually works." He referenced his experience handling capital punishment litigation as a Supreme Court clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia as the premise for this belief.^[6]

Prior to declaring his candidacy for president, Lawrence Lessig held a press conference on August 31, 2015, with community advocates and racial justice activists in Ferguson, Missouri.^[7] Lessig's campaign described the city as "ground zero" of the Black Lives Matter movement in a press release.^[8]

Surrounded by local activists from the Lost Voices group, Lessig said, "It’s important to me that the very first campaign event we’ve held is in Ferguson, Missouri. Ferguson is ground zero for an idea that we as a nation have to rally to achieve, and that is the idea of equality. It shouldn’t be controversial in America that citizens are equal. Yet we have a system where there are second class citizens everywhere – we have business class citizens and the rest of us.”^[8]

He added, "We are going to fight to make this election about getting our democracy back. ... Black lives matter and this idea will make it so all lives in America celebrate the diversity and strength that is our past and will be our future."^[9]

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