(Originally published by Vanity Fair on April 3, 2025.)

Months after Mark Lemley posted a fiery missive to LinkedIn, he talks to VF about ditching Meta, suing DOGE, and his one regret about his “neo-Nazi” allegation.

“I need a break from work, and life, and frankly this country,” reads Stanford law professor Mark Lemley’s out-of-office email, declaring that he’ll be traveling internationally for the next two weeks. He is, unsurprisingly, short on time, but I manage to catch him en route to the airport for a wide-ranging conversation about what he sees as some of the biggest threats to democracy, why keeping quiet isn’t an option and, as he says, “the country’s dramatic slide into fascism.”

Lemley, a partner at the boutique intellectual property law firm Lex Lumina, has had a busy year.

Continue reading the Q&A here.