[inaudible conversations] good evening, everybody. Welcome to tonights event. Thank you so much for coming despite the noreaster storm and terrible conditions. We really appreciate it. And we could not have a more interesting topic or a better panel to address it. You know, there are some people who are attracted to sort of neat tidy little problems theyd like to solve and other types of people who are attracted to chronic problems that are as old and as deep as politics itself. And curbing corruption is one of those challenges. What i want to say about the members of the panel two of them i know very well and one which i had pleasure of meeting just now is that they are people who manage to talk about this topic which can be quite distressing in an uplifting way and sometimes can make you almost feel optimistic about corruption if thats possible. [laughter] so im very honored to introduce our panelists. First, Zephyr Teachout who recently ran for governor of new york in the democratic primary. I should know, because i was her running mate. [laughter] [applause] and as the author of many books, including corruption america which is the book shes talking about today and has also authored a thurm of articles professor a number of articles professor at fordham law school. To her left is janine wedel from george mason university. Shes the author of the book unaccountable which is right here and also back there and also the author of numerous other books. And finally our moderator today is larry lessig who hardly needs introduction, my mentor in law school, my close friend and allaround person who is changing the world. Larry lessig. [laughter] so larry is the moderator, and ill let him take it from here. [applause] thank you tim. And thank you so much, the two of you for participating in this incredible event. And thank you to the new america, is it new america new york city, do i have to say it like that, or can i just say new america . For hosting this. Which is incredibly timely. And for me incredibly exciting. Because these two books, i had known zephyrs, i had seen zephyrs grow for, what, 27 years [laughter] and ive loved zephyrs book ever since you started at 5. [laughter] but janines book ive just had a chance to read and these are two extraordinary books that perfectly complement each other. And they complement each other in the context of a moment where the culture, we have for exampled on fixed on an incredibly narrow perception of corruption. We think of corruption today, corruption is basically rule breaking, quid pro quo its what criminals do can what bad people do. Its what third worlders do, thats what corruption is. So you can know if youre not a third worlder, if youre not a criminal, if youre not a quid pro quo type, if youre not a rule breaker then youre not engaged in corruption. Thats basically the view that dominates in the political space, it dominates in jurisprudence and in so much of popular and professional culture. And these two books come at that conception in two very different ways. Zephyrs book historically gives us an incredible entry into understanding the conception of corruption at the framing. At a time when america conceives of itself as defining a vision of a republic in contrast to a corrupted system which they knew and in some ways loved but believed had collapsed totally and janines account is an to account of a contemporary conception of corruption in many, many different spheres from think tanks to media to government to the academy. Very close to the work that im working on at harvard where were focused on what we call institutional corruption. But theres no significant difference between these two. Whats striking about these two books is one that theyre very very different. Theyre talking about the same thing but very different. Zephyrs book is incredibly optimistic in a certain sense. I was struck watching her run for governor that there was the feature of zephyr that was most helpful was her smile, right . So in her book [laughter] the problem which shes identified in this book is tied to a mistake which makes you feel like the problem is solvable if we could just get one or two people on the Supreme Court to change. Whereas janines problem is, her book is incredibly depressing [laughter] at the end its hard to see what exactly you would do to address this problem. Theres one moment at the end of the book its an extraordinary moment where she describes an event, an incident at a tsa Security Check where she had she didnt want to be body scanned, so she had to use special screening. And, of course, to puppish her punish her they made her wait and wait and wait and wait before they would find a special screener. And she described herself as focused and very disciplined in being as positive and upbeat and polite and kind as she possibly could be. But each five minutes she would and they would say well, someones coming. Nobody came. And so she was at the last moment before she was going to be able to catch her flight and she adopted a strategy to break this norm which was she started singing as loudly as she could [laughter] the starspangled banner. [laughter] and, of course the tsa people quickly looked through their list of regulations and it turns out its not against the rules to sing the starspangled banner, so they had no reason to tackle her or to arrest her. And so the only thing they could do was to get her out by finding somebody to finally search her and let her go. [laughter] so that was and i want to talk about this. [laughter] but the general point the general problem, the general depression of this is if were in this problem in so many spaces, so many spheres like what is the lever that we can use . So the way id like to proceed with this, most of this conversation i want to have is a conversation between these two great authors of these two really great books. And then well have time at the end for questions from the audience. But i want to start, i want to start with zephyr and allow zephyr to really introduce this idea which modern jurists have erased from our history this idea of corruption at the center of what the framers were talking about. And just help us understand how did they get it . Because in a certain sense as i read janines book, i imagine there would have been an equivalent of her book that could have been written that would describe the horrible state of the corruption in britain, but then someone saw that and then figured out how to flip it when they came to america. Yeah. The book is really my far less exciting effort to stand in the middle of the street and sing the starspangled banner as loud as possible. [laughter] yes. So the deeply patriotic book. And, you know, recognizing, it was something i have really learned from larry is ive actually started quoting you almost very bait m larry, which is verbatim larry, which is the founders of our republic, the men who wrote our constitution got many, many, many things wrong. They got race wrong, they got gender wrong, but they had some really powerful insights. And part of, i think, the impulse of the book is to say that the we are going to solve some contemporary problems, theres an extraordinary value in identifying the strains within our history in which theres extraordinary wisdom and value and then elevating those. Because its going to take Something Like singing the starspangled banner, something more than just going along and being cynical to break out of our Current Crisis of corruption. At the Constitutional Convention as i detail in the book there are many different topics, but the topic that comes out more than any other is the question of basically corruption what you might call now money in politics but different ways in which money and power could lead Public Servants to um, represent themselves, their friends, a small group instead of represents the public or their constituencies. I came across this because i was starting to try to understand what the Supreme Court was doing, like how it was defining corruption in some cases in 2006, 2007, and i said lets see what they thought about it, you know back at the beginning. Its actually quite shocking when you read a transcript of the convention, how much this was the focus, the topic. When you when the new Yorker Alexander hamilton later described the Constitutional Convention, he said we tried to enact every practicable intrigue and they were sort of in there messing around how do we put up barriers how do we put up walls . Just a few examples, and then ill answer your question more fully. You know one of things that was most striking to me is they had their own version of what we now think of as the revolving door problem where over 50 of the people go into congress now and become a lobbyist. Huge change from 30 years ago. And then also staffers come in and out staffers and as janine described so eloquently, its more than staffers its sort of a whole network revolve in and out of private and public roles in many ways. Well, at the time the revolving door problem of the Constitutional Convention era or the threat was people who would go into office to get a, go into elected office in order to get an appointed office. Get a great job at the post office. Get a great senate cure that you might not have too many obligations. So it was a way in which the king in england had really secured a lot of power to himself because you basically take a parliamentarian, and if you could promise a really wellpaid job, the parliamentarian was work for the king instead of work for their constituency. And actually mason who your school is named after described the provision in our constitution that prohibits holding an office while holding an elected office as the cornerstone of the constitution, the most important because you didnt want people going into office and serving other masters. Where they got it from, theres sort of a blend of christian and arisk to tail january thinking in the founders this thinking of corruption. But i would argue it predominates its just the [inaudible] at the convention also had something to hang their hat on. Really montesquieu puts virtue and corruption at the core of a successful republic and talks about in language which is very reminiscent of janines book the, you know, if the public for montesquieu it wasnt just the corruption of those in office, but citizenship is an office that can be corrupted. You have an obligation as a citizen to be public oriented in your public actions not in all actions. And montesquieu talks about, you know, were going to be in the real trouble when the citizens of a country sort of give up and wait patiently for their hire. Basically, wait patiently for the moment where they will be hired by one of these private entities. So thats sort of the root that i see coming into the convention. But then when the framers were thinking about, for example, the corruption of parliament right. That kind of corruption operated differently from thinking about or the thing that they were worried about was different from woring about the way an individual might go into parliament so he could get a particular appointment, right . It was the king having an improper role inside of parliament. Yes. I think theyre related. King having an improper role inside of parliament, but theres also a concern about what franklin talked about. If you put the love of money and the love of power in the same place, it will excite the passion for the love of money and the love of power in such a great way that they will be confused, and the worst kind of people will go into Public Office because only those who want to have a lot of money and a lot of power as as opposed to those who want to serve more publicly, and we should figure out systems that attract people to missing part of your question. Yeah, its surprising because its the place we agree upon most. [laughter] a dependency. Yeah. Your focus is still the individual, but the important thing is, you know, janines book brings out so powerfully is the institutional structure and incentive. Yeah. So that was the sense in which they talked about oh, absolutely. You taught me. [inaudible conversations] right. What they talked about was sort of the way in which, you know there are, theres this lovely sort of history. As you know, the language of freedom and independence are very powerful words in american history. And i focus very much on whats happening in this country. And independence at the time was seen as a kind of opposite to corruption, and ip dimension as an opposite independence as an opposite of dependence and dependence and corruption is very similar. And, actually, you can see in the thinkers that the founders relied upon. Theyll use dependents and corruption sometimes interchangeably because the problem was that you would have institutions and individuals within those institutions who were dependent had inappropriate dependencies outside and were not independent of private power, independent of private money or independent of the king. And so they certainly thought about corruption in structural and institution always. It was sort of fundamental. You need to build a system which didnt have didnt encourage the wrong kind of dependencies. Because thats the distinctive blindness of this court. This court will only think of corruption in individual ways, refuses to think about it in structural ways. Yeah. And one of the puzzles is why theyre, why theyve done that. And this is a different and then i want to come to think about the relationship to your book. But this is a really interesting difference in accounts that the two of you give. Because your book is very much a letter to a Supreme Court justice or maybe two Supreme Court justices. [laughter] and part of that letter, you know, as ive tried to emphasize it, is to the originalist on the Supreme Court, people who otherwise say were going to interrupt the constitution the way the framers would have interpreted it. Zephyrs book is a way of saying heres what the framers would have understood corruption to mean, and its radically inconsistent with the narrow conception of corruption that youre offering right now. Thats one part of this message to the framers. But another part of the story youre telling is the way in which there was a long tradition of protecting institutions like government against these corrupt that all of a sudden disappears. And the question is whats motivating it. Like, what is leading what are leading the justices to do that . Because the motivation for that type of corruption feels to me different from the account that youre giving about the motivation, you know to see corruption as just quid pro quo. That has an obvious return to the people who are advancing that idea, but do you think the justices on the Supreme Court are adopting this view . Because think they i think its one of the great puzzles, i genuinely do. And the book has some provisional ideas like why we see 200 years of a broad view one of the jobs of courts in general is to protect against all these kinds of corruption. And then we see the collapse of that understanding. So why . What is Justice Roberts really thinking . What is Justice Scalia really thinking . What is Justice Kennedy really thinking . How can they adopt this . I propose a bunch of theories and i have no idea if any of them are right. Its a genuinely provisional sort of chapter because im throwing out ideas because i want us to engage in this question. We are part of a network of what we call law and economics way of thinking about the world, and that way of thinking about the world relies on the vision of, um the selfish person the egotist. And actually i tie that pack to hobbs. Its a little bit of sort of hobbs arises. And the founders are very antihobbs january. Hobbs has an egotist view of the person. People are fundamentally selfeverybody, thats it. You want to leverage their selfinterests for as good a things a possible. When theyre thinking about policy theyre thinking about themselves. The law of economics embeds that in the law of personality. Another is related to law and economics, just a belief that the best way to govern is outside of democratic representational government. Like a market i find this so fantastical that i have a hard time even expressing it but a market is a better distributer of public goods than a kind of collective public coming together in representative ways. So as much as we can remove politics from the distribution of goods the better it is. And that visioning is politics and Democratic Politics is itself corrupt and corrupting, and so we should run away from that as fast as possible. Another sort of argument i put out there, a little more not controversial, but i know theyll disagree with me on this one is we have a current Supreme Court that doesnt have any people with current political experience on it. So they to not know of what they speak. They have a fantasy about the way politics works and they have no idea what it is like to sit in a room be making strategy and think how important that 2,000 or 4,000 or 6,000 is from a donor. And so they dont realize how profoundly corrupting the private system of Campaign Finance is. Its a kind of naivete or innocence to what they bring. So they have all these mistakes or reasons that are tied to some kind of mistake, but its hard to see them as doing it for their own personal selfinterest which is different from the kind of account that youre offering in many contexts where it certainly serves the interest of people who go from government to private interest to conceive of corruption in this very narrow way, to celebrate the anticorruption campaigns which are fighting corruption conceived in this narrow way because it makes it easy for them to then have enormous personal gains. So i think you see it as tied to that motive much more, do you think . Well i talk about structured accountability and how accountability gets structured into corporate and government organizations and then about the players and the way in which they very often arent even dont even seem to be aware of whats of what, of the terrain on which theyre playing. And, of course my background and my approach is as a social anthropologist and as someone who worked in Eastern Europe under communism and then after communism. And i studied the difference between how the system said it worked, how it was supposed to work and how it actually and how it actually works. Or doesnt work. And so [laughter] so one thing that i ch