StanfordUniversity law professor Lawrence Lessig, one of Utne Reader's visionaries, spoke on September 11, 2008, with Utne Reader senior editor Keith Goetzman about his government reform organization Change Congress.

Why did you suddenly shift your focus from copyright law to government reform and form the organization Change Congress?

I came to a point when I working in copyright law where I recognized that the reason the issues turned out to be so difficult to resolve was largely because of the enormous influence that special interests had in the debate.

It was an obvious point, but then I began to realize how other critical public policy issues—global warming being the one that was most dramatic to me—were also directly injured by exactly the same dynamic of special interests influencing campaigns through contributions, and thereby making it impossible to get something done that would be progress.

So what I resolved was that we weren’t going to make progress on these issues until we found a way to deal with this first problem of the way Congress was being distorted by money, and that’s what made me shift.

Basically, you’ve gone meta on the issue.

Yeah, although if it’s meta, then we’re going to fail. We’ve got meta in the way we think about it, but the whole strategy here has got to get people to see how their particular issue, the thing that gets them angry, is also a product of the dynamic that we’re worried about. If we can get enough people to recognize that and shift some of their effort toward this more fundamental problem, I think we can make some progress on it.

Basically, Change Congress is trying to reduce the influence of PACs and lobbyists, right?

Well, what Change Congress is trying to do first is to bring people into reform movement around Congress, and so we’ve put out a number of planks that people can grab onto as their view about the kind of change that’s needed.

So one of the planks is to eliminate lobbyist and PAC money; one of them is to fundamentally reform earmarks; one of them is to support public funding; and one is them is about transparency. The idea is, if you believe in reform, you tell us which is important to you, and we want to begin a debate about which of these, or which mix of  these, would actually be a solution.