From two distinguished experts on election law, an alarming look at how the American presidency could be stolen--by entirely legal means "Their new book asks whether a second Trump attempt to subvert democracy could succeed. Their answer makes for uncomfortable reading."--Ed Pilkington, The Guardian Even in the fast and loose world of the Trump White House, the idea that a couple thousand disorganized protestors storming the U.S. Capitol might actually prevent a presidential succession was farfetched. Yet perfectly legal ways of overturning election results actually do exist, and they would allow a political party to install its own candidate in place of the true winner. Lawrence Lessig and Matthew Seligman work through every option available for subverting a presumptively legitimate result--from vice-presidential intervention to election decertification and beyond. While many strategies would never pass constitutional muster, Lessig and Seligman explain how some might. They expose correctable weaknesses in the system, including one that could be corrected only by the Supreme Court. Any strategy aimed at hacking a presidential election is a threat to democracy. This book is a clarion call to shore up the insecure system for electing the president before American democracy is forever compromised.
Lawrence Lessig Book order
Larry Lessig is an American academic and political activist renowned for his advocacy of reduced legal restrictions on copyright, trademark, and radio frequency spectrum, particularly within technological applications. He directs the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University and holds a professorship in law at Harvard Law School. Lessig is a founding board member of Creative Commons, celebrated for his dedication to openness and the dismantling of restrictions in the digital realm.







- 2024
- 2019
They Don't Represent Us
- 352 pages
- 13 hours of reading
With insight and urgency, Harvard law professor and author of the bestselling Republic, Lost Lessig argues that the government does not represent society and shows that reform is both essential and possible. America's democracy is in crisis.
- 2018
America, Compromised
- 240 pages
- 9 hours of reading
Lessig mounts an unflinching case that money and power have corrupted nearly every institution in American life-and that unless we accept the part we each, in our well-meaning way, have played in getting us here, we won't be able to make things better.
- 2016
The writings of the computer genius and Internet hacktivist whose tragic suicide shook the world.
- 2008
Zittrain's extraordinary book pieces together the engine that has catapulted the Internet ecosystem into the prominence it has today--and explains that it is sputtering precisely because of its runaway success.
- 2008
Remix
- 327 pages
- 12 hours of reading
Argues that future generations are being harmed by a restrictive copyright system that protects corporate interests, in a report that calls for an end of the practice of criminalizing artists who build on the creative works of others and for implementing a collaborative and profitable "hybrid economy" that protects both creative and ethical needs. 30,000 first printing.
- 2006
Code : version 2.0
- 410 pages
- 15 hours of reading
"Code counters the common belief that cyberspace cannot be controlled or censored. To the contrary, under the influence of commerce, cyberspace is becoming a highly regulable world where behavior will be much more tightly controlled than in real space." -- Cover.
- 2005
Free Culture: the Nature and Future of Creativity
- 368 pages
- 13 hours of reading
Lawrence Lessig, “the most important thinker on intellectual property in the Internet era” (The New Yorker), masterfully argues that never before in human history has the power to control creative progress been so concentrated in the hands of the powerful few, the so-called Big Media. Never before have the cultural powers- that-be been able to exert such control over what we can and can’t do with the culture around us. Our society defends free markets and free speech; why then does it permit such top-down control? To lose our long tradition of free culture, Lawrence Lessig shows us, is to lose our freedom to create, our freedom to build, and, ultimately, our freedom to imagine.
- 2002
The Future Of Ideas
- 384 pages
- 14 hours of reading
The Internet revolution has come. Some say it has gone. In The Future of Ideas , Lawrence Lessig explains how the revolution has produced a counterrevolution of potentially devastating power and effect. Creativity once flourished because the Net protected a commons on which widest range of innovators could experiment. But now, manipulating the law for their own purposes, corporations have established themselves as virtual gatekeepers of the Net while Congress, in the pockets of media magnates, has rewritten copyright and patent laws to stifle creativity and progress.Lessig weaves the history of technology and its relevant laws to make a lucid and accessible case to protect the sanctity of intellectual freedom. He shows how the door to a future of ideas is being shut just as technology is creating extraordinary possibilities that have implications for all of us. Vital, eloquent, judicious and forthright, The Future of Ideas is a call to arms that we can ill afford to ignore.
- 1999
There's a common belief that cyberspace cannot be regulated—that it is, in its very essence, immune from the government's (or anyone else's) control. Code argues that this belief is wrong. It is not in the nature of cyberspace to be unregulable; cyberspace has no “nature.” It only has code—the software and hardware that make cyberspace what it is. That code can create a place of freedom—as the original architecture of the Net did—or a place of exquisitely oppressive control.If we miss this point, then we will miss how cyberspace is changing. Under the influence of commerce, cyberpsace is becoming a highly regulable space, where our behavior is much more tightly controlled than in real space.But that's not inevitable either. We can—we must—choose what kind of cyberspace we want and what freedoms we will guarantee. These choices are all about architecture: about what kind of code will govern cyberspace, and who will control it. In this realm, code is the most significant form of law, and it is up to lawyers, policymakers, and especially citizens to decide what values that code embodies.
