Lawrence Lessig is a legal scholar and activist who founded creative-commons in 2001, extending stallman's copyleft framework from software to cultural and educational works. He has taught at Stanford Law School and Harvard Law School and is one of the leading academic voices on copyright reform.
Lessig was directly influenced by Stallman's work. The free-software-definition and the gpl-copyleft-mechanism provided the conceptual template for Creative Commons licenses, which allow creators to retain some rights while enabling sharing and remixing. The relationship is analyzed in the note copyleft-as-legal-hack and free-software-influence-on-creative-commons.
Stallman has expressed both appreciation for Lessig's work and reservations: Creative Commons licenses include some non-free variants (such as the NonCommercial and NoDerivatives licenses) that do not satisfy the four-freedoms standard. Stallman has specifically endorsed only the CC0 and CC BY and CC BY-SA licenses as free in the relevant sense.
Lessig's books — including "Code" (1999), "The Future of Ideas" (2001), and "Free Culture" (2004) — amplified the arguments of why-software-should-be-free and gnu-manifesto to general audiences. He has also worked on campaign finance reform, connecting his earlier work on intellectual property to broader questions of institutional capture.
The electronic-frontier-foundation and creative-commons represent the downstream institutions most directly shaped by Stallman's philosophy, with Lessig as the key bridge figure.