Lawrence Lessig is co-founder of Change Congress, an organization formed in 2008 to fight corruption by removing the undue influence of special interests on our political system.

Lessig is a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and founder of the school's Center for Internet and Society. Prior to joining the Stanford faculty, he was the Berkman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and a Professor 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.

Professor Lessig represented web site operator Eric Eldred in the ground-breaking case Eldred v. Ashcroft, a challenge to the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. He has won numerous awards, including the Free Software Foundation's Freedom Award, and was named one of Scientific American's Top 50 Visionaries, for arguing "against interpretations of copyright that could stifle innovation and discourse online."

Professor Lessig is the author of Free Culture (2004), The Future of Ideas (2001) and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (1999). He chairs the Creative Commons project, and serves on the board of the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Public Library of Science, and Public Knowledge. He is also a columnist for Wired.

Professor Lessig earned a BA in economics and a BS in management from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA in philosophy from Cambridge, and a JD from Yale.

Professor Lessig teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional law, contracts, and the law of cyberspace.

For more information, please see Steven Levy's profile of Professor Lessig in the October 2002 issue of Wired: Lawrence Lessig's Supreme Showdown or see his curriculum vitae.


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Michael Eisen is an Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and an Associate Professor of Genetics, Genomics and
Development at the University of California, Berkeley.

He received an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Harvard College in 1989. He was a graduate student with Don Wiley at Harvard University, where he
studied the structure and evolution of influenza virus proteins.

After a summer stint as a radio broadcaster for the Columbia Mules, minor
league baseball team in Tennessee, he joined the laboratories of
Patrick O. Brown and David Botstein at Stanford Medical School as a
postdoctoral fellow. While in the Brown-Botstein labs Eisen
contributed to the transformation of the DNA microarray from a
technical novelty into an essential tool for biomedical research.

His1998 paper on clustering DNA microarray data has been cited over 5,000
times. In 2000 he started his own lab at Lawrence Berkeley National
Lab and UC Berkeley, studying the evolution of gene regulation. He was
named a Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences in 2001 and received a
Presidential Early Career Award in Sciences and Engineering in 2004.

In addition to his research, Eisen has been a staunch advocate for
"open access" publishing. In 2000, along with Pat Brown and Nobel
Prize winning cancer biologist Harold Varmus, he founded the Public
Library of Science - a not for profit scientific publisher dedicated
to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely
available public resource. He continues to serve on the PLoS Board,
and is actively engaged in developing new ways to disseminate and use
scientific knowledge.

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