Law Commons^™

Recalibrating Campaign Finance Law, Anthony Johnstone

Faculty Law Review Articles

This Essay seeks to provide a theoretical framework for conceptualizing this relationship and considering reforms. Part I traces the variation of campaign finance regimes across several political eras and several jurisdictional scales. Strikingly, although similar six-figure campaign finance scandals prompted the reforms of each era, federal lawmakers in each era have drawn progressively lower one-size-fits-all contribution limits and disclosure thresholds. Meanwhile, state campaign finance laws have been more carefully calibrated to reflect the electoral and financial circumstances of particular electoral contests. Part II considers the currently permissible means and ends of campaign finance law and how they constrain the calibration …

The System Of Campaign Finance Disclosure, Anthony Johnstone

Faculty Law Review Articles

This Essay considers Professor Gilbert’s model as the core element in a dynamic system of campaign finance disclosure. First, it recognizes several useful contributions of the model’s framework of informational costs and benefits. In the simplest analysis, disclosure increases the information available to voters by adding source revelation to campaign speech. However, the reality is more complicated. Disclosure can have a chilling effect that decreases the amount of campaign speech by imposing administrative and exposure burdens on speakers. As Professor Gilbert shows, this cannot end the analysis. What matters is not just the magnitude of the chilling effect on speech, …

Foreword: The State Of The Republican Form Of Government In Montana, Anthony Johnstone

Faculty Law Review Articles

This foreword to the 2012 Browning Symposium contributes to the discussion of republican forms of government in the states by situating Montana's experience in broader themes of federal intervention in state republicanism. It serves as an epilogue to match Jeff Wiltse's prologue, which reexamines the election in 1912 that gave birth to the Corrupt Practices Act by examining the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court's burial of that law 100 years later.

Part I of the foreword considers the recent federal constitutional challenges that dismantled elements of the republican form of government that prevailed in Montana for the past century. …