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Applying Citizens United To Ordinary Corruption: With A Note On Blagojevich, Mcdonnell, And The Criminalization Of Politics, George D. Brown

George D. Brown

Federal criminal law frequently deals with the problem of corruption in the form of purchased political influence. There appear to be two distinct bodies of federal anticorruption law: one concerning constitutional issues in the prevention of corruption through campaign finance regulation, and one addressing corruption in the form of such crimes as bribery, extortion by public officials, and gratuities to them. The latter body of law primarily presents issues of statutory construction, but it may be desirable for courts approaching these issues to have an animating theory of what corruption is and how to deal with it. At the moment, …

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Citizens Disunited: Mccutcheon V. Federal Election Commission, Adam Lamparello

Adam Lamparello

The wealthy are democracy’s darlings, the middle class are its stepchildren, and the poor are its orphans. And the Constitution’s written and unwritten rights are alive for the wealthy, merely evolving for the middle class, and dead for the poor. Corporate giants like Goldman Sachs and AT&T line the pockets of senatorial candidates—and purchase influence—while average citizens walk into a polling station, often encounter voter suppression tactics, and cast a largely symbolic vote. Stated simply, we now live in a society of soft inequality. Like the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” soft inequality has created a liberty gap between the …

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High Courts And Election Law Reform In The United States And India, Manoj Mate

Manoj S. Mate

Over the past decade, the push for electoral reform in India and the United States – the world’s two largest democracies – has been promi- nent in the politics and governance of both nations. The supreme courts in each country have played important, but distinct, roles in recent electoral reform efforts, responding to different facets and regimes of political corruption. In the 1990s, the Indian Supreme Court became increasingly assertive in requiring greater levels of dis- closure and transparency for political parties in India. In a series of decisions in 2002 and 2003, the Indian Supreme Court challenged the Central …

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Collective Choice, Justin Schwartz

Justin Schwartz

This short nontechnical article reviews the Arrow Impossibility Theorem and its implications for rational democratic decisionmaking. In the 1950s, economist Kenneth J. Arrow proved that no method for producing a unique social choice involving at least three choices and three actors could satisfy four seemingly obvious constraints that are practically constitutive of democratic decisionmaking. Any such method must violate such a constraint and risks leading to disturbingly irrational results such and Condorcet cycling. I explain the theorem in plain, nonmathematical language, and discuss the history, range, and prospects of avoiding what seems like a fundamental theoretical challenge to the possibility …

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Full-Text Articles in Courts

Applying Citizens United To Ordinary Corruption: With A Note On Blagojevich, Mcdonnell, And The Criminalization Of Politics, George D. Brown

George D. Brown

Citizens Disunited: Mccutcheon V. Federal Election Commission, Adam Lamparello

Adam Lamparello

High Courts And Election Law Reform In The United States And India, Manoj Mate

Manoj S. Mate

Collective Choice, Justin Schwartz

Justin Schwartz