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The Price Of Corruption, Usha Rodrigues

Scholarly Works

The Supreme Court recently held that campaign contributions under $5200 do not create a “cognizable risk of corruption.” It was wrong. This Essay describes a nexus of timely contributions and special-interest legislation. In the most noteworthy case, a CEO made a first-time $1000 donation to a member of Congress. The next day that representative introduced a securities bill tailored to the interests of the CEO’s firm.

Armed with this real-world account of how small-dollar campaign contributions coincided with favorable legislative action, the Essay reads McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission with a critical eye. In McCutcheon the Supreme Court assumed that …

Intentionalism Justice Scalia Could Love, Hillel Y. Levin

Scholarly Works

There is something useful, indeed beautiful, about a work that carefully and eloquently explores a new idea or reexamines an old one. The Nature of Legislative Intent is therefore useful and beautiful, and it offers much of philosophical value for textualist and non-textualist alike. but it offers little of practical consequence and is therefore unlikely to advance the ball outside of the hall of academia, not simply because of the failure of judges to take legal scholarship seriously (which is there loss, as well as sosciety's), but because on its own terms it cannot.

Concept And Contract In The Future Of International Law, John Linarelli

Scholarly Works

This is an article written for a symposium on Joel Trachtman’s book, The Future of International Law. I first deal with the contractarian features of Trachtman’s approach to understanding international law. Using the tools of new institutional economics and constitutional economics, Trachtman seeks to describe the features of an international legal system. This is positive political theory or at least relates substantially to the methods of positive political theory. I explore a different approach, one connecting to normative political theory. In its ambitious sense, my approach would see international law as a form of moral argument, but in its modest …