According to Lessig, congresspersons being dependent on large donors affects the ability of Congress to govern, whether or not donations actually change the way members of Congress vote on measures. It leads to inertia: left-leaning Occupy Wall Street activists see little progress on legislation dealing with global warming, while right-leaning Tea Party activists see little progress on simplifying the tax code. He noted that congresspersons spend three of every five weekdays raising money for reelection.

In Lessig's view, it is a systemic problem. Lessig sees the system as 'legal but corrupt', and that the pivotal point of the corruption is campaign finance. The central argument of Republic, Lost is that members of the US Congress are dependent upon funding from large donors. In October, 2015 a second edition of the book was published. Lessig has been described in The New York Times as an 'original and dynamic legal scholar.' He argued that the Congress in 2011 spent the first quarter debating debit-card fees while ignoring what he sees as more pressing issues, including health care reform or global warming or the deficit. In a departure from the topics of his previous books, Republic, Lost outlines what Lessig considers to be the systemic corrupting influence of special-interest money on American politics, and only mentions copyright and other free culture topics briefly, as examples. (A wise choice, as it is cheaper than printing the book in most contexts.Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress-and a Plan to Stop It is the sixth book by Harvard law professor and free culture activist Lawrence Lessig. And obviously, you can also buy the book at the links to the right. The text is also available in a Wiki hosted by SocialText. You can download the full text in PDF form. Reflecting the contributions of the community to this new work, all royalties have been dedicated to Creative Commons. The Wiki text was licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License. Lessig took the Wiki text as of 12/31/05, and then added his own edits. From the Preface: 'This is a translation of an old book-indeed, in Internet time, it is a translation of an ancient text.' That text is Lessig's 'Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace.' The second version of that book is 'Code v2.' The aim of Code v2 is to update the earlier work, making its argument more relevant to the current internet.Ĭode v2 was written in part through a collaborative Wiki.

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